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THE WAR WITHIN 



THE WAR WITHIN 



BEING 

A FEW ADMONITORY THOUGHTS 

UPON SOME MODERN 

TEMPTATIONS 



BY 

JOHN EDWARDS LE BOSQUET 



BOULDER, COLORADO 

Published by 

THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH 

1911 



*> 



&. 



V* 



Copyright 1911 by 
John Edwards Le Bosquet 

All Rights Reserved 



This book may be purchased in Boulder, Colorado, from the 
following booksellers: The Co-op, Greenman Stores Co., Paul 
Raymond. The trade is also supplied by these dealers. 



CI.A305016 



CONTENTS 



I. The War Within .... 

II. The Sponging Spirit 

III. Censoriousness 

IV. Going with the Crowd . 

V. The World as a Picnic-Ground 

VI. The Sin of Exclusiveness 

VII. The Struggle for Superfluities 

VEIL The Sheep and the Goats 

IX. Some Unregarded Misers 

X. Our Modern Babel .... 

XI. The Victory of Hope 



PAGE 

I 

is 

25 

35 
47 
57 
69 

83 

95 
109 

123 



THE WAR WITHIN 



THE view that the soul of man is torn by con- 
tending forces is corroborated in many direc- 
tions of human thought. Plato may well speak 
for the philosophers on this matter when he 
represents man as a charioteer driving a pair of 
winged horses through the air: 

The well-conditioned horse is erect and well-formed; he has 
a lofty neck and an aquiline nose, and his color is white, and he 
has dark eyes and is a lover of honor and modesty and temper- 
ance, and the follower of true glory; he needs not the touch of 
the whip but is guided by word and admonition only. Whereas 
the other is a large misshapen animal, put together anyhow; he 
has a strong, short neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark color, gray- 
eyed and bloodshot, the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared, 
deaf, hardly yielding to blow or spur.* 

The one tends heavenward the other earthward, 
and the driver of them is constantly in discomfort 
and discord for, "as might be expected, there is 
a great deal of trouble in managing them." 

Literature asserts it. I need only mention that 
inspired parable of life, Robert Louis Stevenson's 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good and respected 
Dr. Jekyll finds, in the course of his experiments, 
a drug which will, if taken, release the bad in a 
man from the control of the good in him. The 

*Phaedrus, 253, Jowett's translation. 

3 



4 THE WAR WITHIN 

physician resolves to test it upon himself. He 
knows something of the danger of it, but, to quote 
his words, 

The temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at 

last overcame the suggestions of alarm Late one accursed 

night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and 
smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had sub- 
sided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion. 

The most racking pangs succeeded; a grinding in the bones, 
deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit. Then these agonies 

began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself I felt 

younger, lighter, happier, in body; within I was conscious of 
a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images 
running like a mill race in my fancy, a dissolution of the bonds 
of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the 
soul.* 

He has been changed into the repulsive Mr. Hyde, 
the incarnation of evil and devilishness. For a 
time he rejoices in his successful discovery. He 
enjoys the putting on of another personality, and 
the change, the adventure of it when for an hour 
or two he can venture forth in a disguise absolutely 
impenetrable. But at length with repetition, evil 
gains the mastery, even when he has taken none 
of the drug. He wakes up each morning not Dr. 
Jekyll but the fiendish Mr. Hyde. So the story 
goes on. The drug with which he can throw off 
Mr. Hyde is used up at last. He tries to replace 

* Chapter entitled "Dr. Lanyon's Narrative." 



THE WAR WITHIN 5 

it. In vain! With the energy of desperation he 
sends to every pharmacist in the city. All, all 
useless! The final tragedy is come to pass. He 
is Mr. Hyde for good and all with no possibility 
of ever being again the beloved and, above all, the 
self-respecting Dr. Jekyll. Is not the basis and 
background of this powerful tale plainly the keen 
sense of the novelist that in each man evil and 
good are battling, warring for supremacy? 

Science asserts the fact and with far more 
authority. The great word of science at present 
is evolution, the mounting up of higher forms from 
lower ones. But this " evolution " is no mechanical 
certainty. At every stage there are always two 
forces at work. There is the tendency onward to 
new and higher species, and there is the trend 
backward to former lower levels. There is not 
only " development"; there is also " reversion to 
type." There is " evolution" but also " degenera- 
tion." A war is on in every geological formation, 
in every species, yes in every individual plant and 
animal. A fine illustration of this individual aspect 
of the world-struggle in an animal is to be found 
in a book* published some years ago by Mr. Jack 
London. It is the narrative of a dog who feels 
both the backward and the forward pull. At the 

* The Call of The Wild. 



6 THE WAR WITHIN 

opening chapter the dog in question is living in 
great contentment with his master in the camp 
life of the western woods. But one day the animal 
chances to hear the baying of some wolves in the 
distance. The sound rouses something new and 
strange and stirring within him, for, as every 
scientist knows, his species far back in the past 
was not dog but wolf. Often after that the dog 
wanders in the forest at night, tasting, relishing 
from afar the tang of the old freedom of the wood ; 
watching the wolves, listening to their yelpings, 
his head cocked to one side, not joining them but 
keenly interested and vaguely envious. All the 
while by day he is still the same affectionate, 
domestic comrade he has ever been. The master 
dies. The dog is inconsolable. He haunts the 
grave. Yet from time to time he wanders in the 
wood at night, and now and then as time goes on, 
by day. He refuses to accept any other master. 
He is becoming a wild thing. So he lives for 
months, his master's burial-place his only link with 
humanity, himself wavering — till at length he dis- 
appears. He has joined the wolf-pack. He has 
heard and obeyed "the call of the wild." 

And this war, which science knows so well in all 
nature, is even more in man, a part of nature in 
the very fact that he is at the head of nature. Man 



THE WAR WITHIN 7 

as such, for science as well as religion, hears two 
voices within him, the one reactionary, calling him 
back to savagery and even to brutishness, the 
other summoning him onward to the heights of self- 
control and civilization and morality and religion. 
Deeper than all, our own experience testifies to 
the fact. In each of us there is — we all know it — 
an evil and a good, a worse and a better. Call it 
conscience over against pleasure, or the truer self 
over against one's evil propensities, or the voice of 
God and the voice of the devil; call it what you 
please: the fact of experience is there in every 
human being. There is a great war going on 
within, a great struggle between powerfully con- 
tending forces. Look at the armies as they are 
to be found face to face. On the one side there is 
all that would debase: sloth bidding us take life 
easily and comfortably; sensuality crying ever, 
"More, more"; selfishness and greed urging us to 
grasp all in our power for our own; hatred, envy, 
ill- temper, seeking to transform us into beasts. 
The lusts of the flesh ! They are in every man and 
woman of us. But, thank God, theirs is not the 
only army in the field. See on the other side the 
forces which bless and uplift drawn up in battle 
array: the beauty of holiness; the joy of purity 
and cleanness of life; the blessedness of generosity; 



8 THE WAR WITHIN 

the appealing grace of kindliness; the attractive- 
ness and deep worth of helpfulness, unselfishness, 
and love. Ah the spiritual forces — the good, the 
true, the beautiful, the manly, the womanly, the 
earnest ! We all are acquainted with the flesh but 
we all know the spirit too. Both appeal to us, 
the one to our sense of ease and our desire for 
immediate returns, the other to our strength and 
truth and heroism. The flesh and the spirit! We 
feel the tug of each of them; we are both of them 
at once. The flesh and the spirit! There they 
are. Sometimes they face each other in mutual 
repulsion. More often they are clutching, wrest- 
ling, hacking at each other, struggling for the 
battle-ground they occupy — which is your soul and 
mine. They are both within us; they are both 
part of us: it is a civil war and that renders it the 
more discordant and disagreeable. But pleasant 
or not it goes on. Day after day "the flesh 
lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the 
flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other." 
There can be no question of the struggle. There 
is a war within. 

What now is our position as regards this great 
war? There are three possible attitudes, one or 
another of which men do, as a matter of fact, take. 
First, let us be reminded of those who take the side 
of evil frankly and thoroughly, gladly with energy 



THE WAR WITHIN 9 

affirming the pleasures of brutishness, the agreeable 
aspects of sense and selfishness and sin. These are 
they who not merely yield to evil, but hurl them- 
selves downward. Such people descend with 
incredible rapidity. We have all known one or 
two examples, alas, of this class. The war is soon 
over with them for the reason that evil triumphs 
so speedily. There are not for long any reprovings 
of conscience, for the tongue of conscience is, at 
the outset, torn out by the roots. This attitude 
toward the situation puts an end to the war within 
in very truth, but it does so as death puts an end 
to disease. 

Still others take a spectator, non-committal posi- 
tion. They realize something of the struggle and 
they look on, not without interest, to see how it 
will come out — much as a sportsman leans some- 
times on his gun to watch the upshot of an even 
fight between his dog and some wild beast. Or like 
Samson in his dallyings with the danger with which 
Delilah repeatedly threatened him,* they will 
wonder, at each conflict, what form of temptation 
or beguilement will offer itself next, making mean- 
while no move to overcome or even to avoid the 
danger. Such persons will sometimes have a great 
deal to say about their faults and their virtues. 

* Judg., chap. 14. 



10 THE WAR WITHIN 

They can catalogue themselves often as well as any 
psychological novelist. But they never soil their 
hands by taking any part in the warfare between 
the flesh and the spirit. They look on — that is 
all! Now the result of this attitude, the far too 
common attitude of most men and women, is 
always the same if it be long persisted in. If we 
keep out of the fight, evil will wax and good will 
wane. The worse will push the better in us back, 
back, more and more, until at last our good, gasp- 
ing, panting, will reach the point of practical 
extinction. As Scripture says — though in a dif- 
ferent connection — "My spirit shall not always 
strive with man." 

A third attitude toward the war within is taken 
by those who look on for a time to comprehend 
what it is all about. Then they quietly, firmly 
take their position on the right side, reinforcing 
with all the power that is theirs goodness, truth, 
beauty, "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, 
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are 
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report." 
Those who take this attitude are at the furthest 
remove from mere spectators. On the contrary 
they make goodness and righteousness within them 
their especial task. They enter with vim and per- 



THE WAR WITHIN 1 1 

sistence into a never-ceasing campaign against the 
forces of evil, against their own besetting tempta- 
tions. And what is the result ? At first the fight 
is all the hotter, the harder, the more intolerable. 
But as one keeps on, at length — after years it may 
be — the evil within one is driven back and over- 
powered, not slain but bound down, nailed living 
— to use the fine figure of St. Paul* — to a cross, a 
treacherous menace always, able to deal us many 
a foul side-blow at times, but yet on the whole 
subdued and put in the proper place of subjection. 
As life advances still farther, there is a growing 
peace, a peace not of defeat but of conquest. And 
all the while within each helper of good the spirit 
swells and develops from the size of the mustard 
seed to that which covers the heavens. And 
slowly, slowly, but really, the mark of the beast, 
which is on us all, fades and fades and fades. 

Now the plain question we should each put to 
ourselves is, " Which of these three attitudes am I 
taking?" Or more simply, for it all comes to 
that, "Which side am I on ? Am I aiding the evil 
or the good? Am I with the flesh or with the 
spirit ? " The question is not which appeals to me 
most. Everybody, other things being equal, 
favors the good and the godlike. The real question 

* Gal. s : 24. 



12 THE WAR WITHIN 

is on which side am I fighting ? It is not which do 
I like, but which do I love ? It is not which do I 
want, but which do I will? It is not whether I 
mean well, but whether I am acting well. Oh! as 
we see this war may we not enlist on the divine 
side, once and for all righting there, never giving 
up. That is the spirit which overcomes the world ! 
That is the faith that attains victory ! 

Christian, dost thou see them 

On the holy ground, 
How the hosts of darkness 

Compass thee around ? 
Christian, up and smite them, 

Counting gain but loss; 
Smite them, Christ is with thee, 

Soldier of the cross. 

Christian, dost thou feel them, 

How they work within, 
Striving, tempting, luring, 

Goading into sin ? 
Christian, never tremble; 

Never be downcast; 
Gird thee for the battle, 

Thou shalt win at last. 

Christian, dost thou hear them, 

How they speak thee fair ? 
"Always fast and vigil? 

Always watch and prayer?" 
Christian, answer boldly: 

"While I breathe I pray": 
Peace shall follow battle, 

Night shall end in day. 



THE WAR WITHIN 13 

" Well I know thy trouble, 

My servant true; 
Thou art very weary, 

1 was weary too; 

But that toil shall make thee 

Some day all Mine own, 
And the end of sorrow 

Shall be near My throne." 



THE SPONGING SPIRIT 



DO you remember the servant in the parable 
who put the money his Lord entrusted to 
him in a napkin and buried it in the earth ? The 
most sinful and disgusting aspect of that man's 
deed has never been, for me, his foolishness, but 
rather his small-mindedness! For it was not 
ignorance which might be pardonable, but currish, 
snappish aversion to being of any use that prompted 
his burying of his one talent. "Lord," he says, 
"I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping 
where thou didst not sow, and gathering where thou 
didst not scatter." It was mean dislike of his lord 
and unwillingness accordingly to do anything by 
which the master might be profited, which explains 
his action; and the severe punishment meted out 
to that action was aimed at his motive, so petty 
and so contemptible. He had been long cared for 
and supported by his lord very probably, so that 
it would have been but fair that he should have 
done his part now that some return to his lord was 
possible. But no! He had taken much, yet he 
would give nothing. 

It is this sponging spirit from which I wish to 
draw our moral. The unsocial shirking of what he 
might have done and ought to have done appears 

17 



18 THE WAR WITHIN 

as it happens, in the keeping of money out of cir- 
culation. That reminds us immediately of those 
other spongers after a time of panic who in the 
same way hoard their resources, waiting, as they 
say, for " confidence" but doing nothing themselves 
to bring confidence again to the financial world. 
But quite apart from any such accidentally similar 
expressions of the same trait, the sponging spirit is 
to be seen in many different directions. 

Look at those who live as to material matters 
not by their own labor but upon that of others. 
The idlers in general are of this type. Whether it 
be the tramp or the idle rich that does nothing, 
each is equally a drag on society, unjustly profiting 
by the toil of others. So the gamblers everywhere, 
whether their gambling is done with cards or wheat 
or stocks, are taking, to be sure, a little more pains 
than the idlers to sponge on the common store won 
by other men's labor. But at bottom their spirit 
is the same. They are seeking to get a share by 
chance of what self-respecting workers have earned 
by the sweat of their brow. So with the rascally in- 
competent work which is sometimes seen. Whether 
it take the form of grafting, in public officials, or of 
scamp work by a laborer at two dollars a day, 
matters not. It is all the same thing. It is taking 
money under false pretenses from the public. 



THE SPONGING SPIRIT 19 

Just who really foots the bill in such cases is not 
often known to anybody with any definiteness, 
least of all probably to the victim who really 
suffers. But this much is always certain. The 
man, who, with full consciousness of what he is 
doing, works at less than his full ability is making 
somebody carry just the burden which he has 
shuffled from his own shoulders. The essence of 
his fault is that he is not willing to do his full share. 
He is not, as the phrase goes, "worth his salt," 
but he takes it, all he can get of it. When the boys 
go coasting the thing is seen often in the pulling 
of the double-runner up the hill. Some boys tug 
at their ropes with a will. Others hold the rope 
taut but pull not an ounce. Still others will slyly 
jump on the sled for a moment — when the others 
are not looking — and be actually drawn up the 
hill, for a few moments of bliss. Perhaps that may 
illustrate the point here. The idlers are those who 
in some fashion have succeeded in getting upon the 
sled and are being drawn up the laborious hill of 
providing life's material necessities. The workers 
who do not do their best are those who walk indeed 
but do no real pulling at the ropes. Some sponge 
more than others, it is true, but all of this class are 
sufficiently disgusting. If I examine a sheep out 
in the field, lifting up the wool and looking close 



20 THE WAR WITHIN 

to his skin, there will be seen very soon a sheep-tick 
like a whitish fester, distended, gorged, his chief 
organ a mouth, living on the life-blood and vitality 
of the host. It is a repulsive sight. A parasite is 
always an unlovely thing, on a sheep or in the 
world of toiling humanity. We should be unwilling 
and ashamed to have the name parasite applied 
to ourselves. But certain it is that every person 
not doing his full part in life — and it is not 
difficult to tell whether we are working to our full 
— is living on others and is precisely a parasite. 
This goes indeed deeper than we realize. There 
appeared not long since in one of our weeklies an 
article under the title "Have You Paid Your 
Board?" The substance of it was that however 
it may be as to our landlady's bill, if we have not 
given something really worth having to the world 
by what our occupation in life effects, then, no 
matter what we can afford and pay for, we are not 
giving a just equivalent for our food and drink 
— to say nothing about other ways in which we 
are kept alive and happy — in other words we have 
not "paid our board." This is a homely but 
accurate statement of the duty of us all if we are 
not to be, so far as our material needs are concerned, 
mere spongers upon society. 
But supposing we are doing our full part so far 



THE SPONGING SPIRIT 21 

as the physical necessities are concerned. It is not 
even then certain that we are innocent of the spong- 
ing spirit. For even more common than the 
shirking of material tasks is the shirking of one's 
due moral contribution to the life of men. I can 
make that plain by saying at once that no man is 
doing his part morally speaking except somewhere, 
somehow, he is doing something positive and 
energetic — all that in him lies — for the moral 
bettering of life. How he shall do it does not so 
much matter. It may be by going into politics 
with a mission — such activity as Theodore Roose- 
velt suggests in his early book on The Young Man 
in Politics. It may be in Y.M.C.A. work. It may 
be done through some lodge or secret society or 
club in so far as the organization in question exists 
not exclusively for a good time, or as an end in 
itself, but as a means to a wider brotherhood and 
a deeper devotion to truth and virtue. Best and 
simplest of all it may be advanced in and through 
the church which, after all admissions have been 
made, is still the mightiest and most naturally 
working of all the agencies for blessing and saving 
society as individuals and as a whole. One may 
busy oneself through these or any other methods 
in so far as they are real efforts for bettering, in 
one way or another, the moral living of men. But 



22 THE WAR WITHIN 

whatever the method or instrumentality, every- 
body owes to humanity a moral effort. Society 
will go down hill if it is not resolutely pushed up 
hill by human helpfulness. It is only because men 
like you and me have put their shoulders to the 
burden and lifted the world's ideas and ideals inch 
by inch, strainingly, perspiringly, that the world 
has its precious moral standards of living today. 
We all realize the value of these standards but some 
of us want to enter into other men's labors rather 
than to add our due share to those necessary moral 
efforts. You will find in every town and city men 
who have, they say, no time except for their busi- 
ness and their family. They can do nothing for 
any of the ideal-raising activities of their com- 
munity. Sunday must be spent — so far as they 
do not use it in their offices — in sleep, lolling at 
home, or in a long tramp. Certainly they can 
spare none of it, none whatever, for church-going! 
And when a subscription-paper comes to them 
appealing for funds for a boy's club, or the Salva- 
tion Army or — worst of all in their eyes — for mis- 
sionary work outside their city, they throw up their 
hands in indignant amazement. What! give of 
their hard-earned money for some object from 
which they will gather no tangible return? Im- 
possible! Would they be willing to live for a 



THE SPONGING SPIRIT 23 

moment in a city which had no churches or 
Y.M.C.A. or other effort to keep life and morals 
clean and wholesome ? Why, no ! They want these 
activities to go on but they will do nothing to aid 
them. They want to profit by them with no labor 
on their part. What is this but the attitude of 
the parasite everywhere ? Is it not clear that the 
spirit of the man who refuses to do anything for 
any of the good works which are afoot in his com- 
munity — and there are many such men in every 
community — is not only a selfish but a sponging 
spirit? I know he doesn't realize it or intend it so, 
but that is what it amounts to. 

Oh, let us see things as they are ! Let us not be 
eternally letting things go and doing as little as 
we can. Somebody will have to work the harder 
and more intolerably because of our lighthearted 
remissness. Let us take no longer the tramp atti- 
tude of irresponsibility which comes so natural to 
us. But rather let us for very self-respect take the 
stand that we will share in all the work of the 
world, material, intellectual, moral, to the full 
extent that is due from us. Neither God nor man 
can ask more than that from us. But are we doing 
that? Are we parasites upon society, in some 
way or other profiting thanklessly by the toil of 
others, or are we really doing our part? 



CENSORIOUSNESS 



WE all have a blind eye so far as our own 
failings are concerned, but there are few 
who cannot perceive with hawk-like clearness the 
failings of others. It is a pity that this should be 
the case for as matter of fact every person that 
lives has his faults, and if we see these and, still 
worse, look for them and dwell upon them at every 
opportunity, we shall have plenty of material for 
harsh judgments of our neighbors. 

How many of these cruel criticisms are passed 
every day! You will hear them in the home. 
What a habit there is about many a table of dis- 
cussing and condemning practically everybody in 
the family's circle of acquaintance. There is too 
much of "I don't see why Mr. X doesn't buy his 
wife a new hat!" or "Did you ever meet such a 
self-conceited nobody as Mrs. Y?" and so on and 
so on. The only matter on which some families 
can seem to reach entire agreement is the dis- 
paragement of various people in the vicinity. The 
same censorious spirit is to be descried in what 
we call gossip, which is nothing more nor less than 
the picking up and brooding over and passing on 
of choice morsels of cruel judgment on some friend 
or colleague or neighbor. Look out the next time 

27 



28 THE WAR WITHIN 

that you are discussing some person you know, 
and take care lest that discussion degenerate into 
a dissection. Talking about people is very well. 
There is nothing more interesting, there is nothing 
more valuable in its place than men and women 
as a subject of conversation. But never, never 
think that you are really and adequately expound- 
ing an acquaintance when you are only cataloguing 
his or her faults! That is not the genial gazing 
and speculating upon our common humanity which 
we may well enjoy; that is judging — an attitude 
we have no right to take. 

But it is young people who need perhaps far 
more than their elders to be warned against cen- 
soriousness. For the judgments of youth are often 
very hard indeed. Those of us who are older have 
because of that fact had considerable experience 
of life. We have fallen in the dust in some of our 
struggles with temptation. And even though we 
have usually come off victorious, we know how 
easily we might have succumbed and how pecu- 
liarly difficult it is to avoid all failings. We are 
more charitable and far less likely to judge harshly 
because we realize our own frailty. But the young 
people have not fallen before any serious tempta- 
tions, they have not lived long enough. They 
have not yet known the bitterness of defeated 



CENSORIOUSNESS 29 

resolves or the dead weight of duty almost too 
heavy to bear. They can discern very plainly 
what men and women ought to be, they can see 
ideals with crystal clearness — that is a part of 
their glorious heritage of youth — but they have 
known till now little if anything of the toilsomeness 
of reaching those ideals which are so right and so 
obvious. How easy for the young person to judge 
bitterly those in the thick of a struggle of which 
he has no conception! Look out, young people, 
guard against judging, and especially in the case 
of those who are older and more heavily weighted 
down than yourselves, for your judgments at such 
times will be sure to be unfair and therefore the 
more inhuman. Judge not, that you be not 
judged when, ten years hence it may be, you make 
a worse failure than that you condemn today. 

I should not be faithful to my theme, if I did not 
apply it in particular to one class of young people 
of whom we have many, many in our country in 
general and in our city in particular. The cen- 
sorious spirit nowhere comes to its bloom so com- 
pletely and so harmfully as sometimes among 
university students. It is not that they are 
naturally less kindly, but the conditions in which 
they are tend to render them censorious. In 
college, as all college students know, the mind is 



30 THE WAR WITHIN 

trained and developed, and that means at once 
that the critical faculties are being polished and 
sharpened and pointed. One learns at college, one 
must learn if he is really being taught anything, to 
see flaws where flaws are, to detect fallacies, to 
search out true as opposed to apparent causes in 
physics, chemistry, biology, history, etc., to be 
aware immediately of inconsistencies in arguments 
and motives and literary workmanship. These 
are a necessary part of college training. Except 
the student become expert in such matters as these, 
he will scarcely become a rationally acting human 
being, unswayed, as every educated man and 
woman ought to be unswayed, by impulse or 
prejudice or popular contagion. Our students in 
college can never really grasp the true unless they 
know how to cast aside the false. Their minds 
must be taught to perceive and recognize clearly, 
piercingly, all the important factors of this world 
of things and men in which they are to live. 
Nothing need be said, or can be said against this 
process. Students are much the better for going 
through it. 

But there is need to protest against the misusing 
of these critical faculties with which an education 
provides one. College young men and women are 
too often set up and made conceited by their newly 



CENSORIOUSNESS 3* 

acquired penetration. They like to apply it to 
people and things where it is distinctly out of place. 
They too frequently emerge from a classroom criti- 
cizing their instructor when they ought to be trying 
to assimilate his novel point of view. They return 
from church pulling to pieces, all the way to their 
rooms, the congregation or the service or the ser- 
mon. If they attend a prayer-meeting they are 
often amused where they ought to have been 
edified. During vacation if they are so fortunate 
as to be at home again, how commonly they note 
and comment freely upon the ugly furniture or the 
inartistic arrangements of the house, and between- 
times they correct mother's grammar and father's 
manners to the bewilderment and distress of the 
parents whose hard toil and generous love have 
made college possible. University students should 
use their sharpened minds upon the problems of 
life, but too often they use them to hack at every- 
thing and everybody about them. As a boy with 
a new knife mars all the furniture of the school- 
room within reach for sheer joy in the possession 
of a new tool, so many a college youth, trying his 
criticism upon everything he sees, manages to 
scratch more or less everything about him. He 
becomes out of sorts and cynical and even believes 
sometimes that this all shows how bright and keen- 
minded he is. If this goes to extremes, he will spoil 



32 THE WAR WITHIN 

his environment and his happiness for himself by 
an overlavish and misplaced use of censoriousness. 
Worst of all he will isolate himself more and more 
from his kind, especially from those less educated 
than himself, because he will see increasingly all 
about him in every direction nothing but ignorance 
and vulgarity and faultiness. 

Now this is all a mistake. The critical faculty 
is a valuable instrument but it ought not to be 
in use on every occasion. You students are not 
really masters of yourselves except you can keep 
this power dormant when it is not called for, which 
will be the great majority of the time. Never 
develop a faculty of cutting, sarcastic speech: 
cultivate rather the ability to be graciously, demo- 
cratically companionable with anybody and every- 
body, high or low, educated or ignorant. Find out 
not only how to criticize people — anybody can do 
that, though not so skilfully as you — but how to 
live with men and women without criticizing them 
— a far greater achievement. Your trained mind 
is a sharp sword which is indispensable at certain 
junctures, but when it is not needed, keep it in its 
scabbard and it will be all the brighter, all the 
sharper, all the more telling when you do draw it 
forth. It is, believe me, just as important — and 
probably even more important — to learn when not 
to be critical as it is to be able, at the right time, 



CENSORIOUSNESS 33 

pointedly to criticize. See to it then that with all 
your keenness you know when to put it one side 
and to look at the world of men with unsophisti- 
cated, believing, loving eyes. As Scripture has it, 
"With all thy getting get understanding." If you 
do not succeed in that, you will be not the better 
but the worse for your acquiring of an education. 

As with college students, so with us all. The 
censorious spirit is sometimes highly necessary. 
We ought to have it at election time when it is our 
public duty to vote according to the true inward- 
ness of men and measures, or when we are asked 
for franchises affecting the public welfare. It 
ought to be present and active when one is looking 
for a pastor or a wife, or deciding upon a profession 
in life. But this testing, weighing, critical attitude 
should not be the regular point of view of any of 
us. After election be charitable, even though the 
other side did carry off the offices. After the 
franchise matter is settled, be hopeful! After you 
have called a pastor, support him ! After marriage, 
or after you have become well settled in your trade 
or profession, be sure not to dwell on whatever 
unsatisfactory aspects may appear. Make the best 
of them, learning even to be oblivious of them. 

Yet there is one place where the critical attitude 
is always in order. If you wish to use it, if you 
fear that it is in danger of becoming rusty, just use 



34 THE WAR WITHIN 

it upon yourself. It is really needed there every 
day as it is not needed in the case of others. Act in 
the spirit which scrutinizes and tests and so rejects 
or accepts, with regard to your duties, your oppor- 
tunities, your choices, not very often with regard 
to others' duties and opportunities and choices. 
Use your sharp penetrating insight upon your own 
character, upon your quibblings, your pretexts to 
avoid rightdoing, your weaknesses and blunders, 
not upon those of your neighbors. In a word, take 
the beam out of your own eye and be less troubled 
about the mote which may possibly be in your 
brother's eye ! So far as your fellows are concerned, 
be able and ready to judge at the proper occasion, 
but let " Judge not!" be your daily motto and 
method. Be just with an inclination to mercy. 
Be charitable, be optimistic as to everybody but 
yourself. The result will be that you will be 
treated more justly, more charitably, more optimis- 
tically than you will have deserved or even ex- 
pected. "For with what judgment ye judge, ye 
shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, 
it shall be measured unto you." Leave to God 
ordinarily the bitter, thankless task of searching 
out and punishing the sins of men, and devote 
most of your time and energy to growing in grace 
and purity and usefulness and loving-kindness! 



GOING WITH THE CROWD 



DO you remember Peter's famous, or rather 
infamous, denial of his Lord ? Why was it ? 
Why did Peter refuse to admit that he was a fol- 
lower of Jesus? Not because there was any 
particular danger to himself in the admission. 
Now that the Pharisees had the master, they would 
not trouble themselves to punish the disciples. 
Even though it had been a hazardous matter, Peter 
was never the man to shrink from peril. No, the 
fact was that the general sentiment of the company 
in which Peter found himself, the servants of the 
high priest's house, was not with but against Jesus; 
and Peter felt that and trimmed his sails accord- 
ingly. It was not that his love for Jesus had 
altered. He had no intention of sinning against 
him or his own profound affection for him. But 
he wanted to be a part of the current about him, 
so he went with it rather than against it. His fault 
there was precisely and plainly that of going with 
the crowd. 

It is this weakness of going with the crowd which 
we might well consider and condemn, not in Peter 
so much as in ourselves. In how many ways we 
show this weakness ! Take the reading with which 
we occupy ourselves. Who of us has read any 

37 



38 THE WAR WITHIN 

important author — Scott, or Dickens, or Milton, 
or Shakespeare — in the past week or even in the 
past year, save perhaps as a part of school work? 
And what have we been filling our minds with? 
Very probably with the newspapers, the fifteen- 
cent magazines, the novels of the day. We have 
been reading, that is, what the crowd is reading. 
This reading "with the crowd" is more widespread 
than many realize. The best recommendation 
most publishers can seem to make of a certain class 
of literature is to say in their advertisement of it 
that " everybody is reading it ! " We have a maga- 
zine just at present that calls itself Everybody's 
Magazine, and no doubt that name in itself attracts 
tens of thousands of readers. In the great majority 
of cases average men and women in their reading 
do not seek out the best, do not choose for them- 
selves at all: they simply "go with the crowd." 

Look at the matter of fashions. I am aware 
that this is a delicate subject. Far be it from me, 
a mere man, to point the finger of scorn at the 
largeness of hats or the smallness of skirts. But 
something may be said on this subject in this con- 
nection. There is admittedly a value in respect- 
ing the prevailing modes to some extent. To wear 
clothing strikingly different from that of others 
argues not principle but crankiness. But after all 



GOING WITH THE CROWD 39 

has been said as to the foolishness of utterly fly- 
ing in the face of the fashions, it must yet be ad- 
mitted that there is much slavishness in poring 
over and following into details what "they are 
wearing this year." Taken by and large, there is 
too little reference in the matter of wearing-apparel 
to the laws of beauty and too much to the laws of 
fashion. Have you never seen a garment which 
is not particularly becoming — which is in point of 
candid fact decidedly the reverse — worn because 
it is "the style"? This too is the sin of "going 
with the crowd"! 

Nor can we of the other sex plume ourselves on 
our independence of behavior. We men go also 
in droves and far more — I sometimes surmise — 
than the women. Take profanity for example. 
It is less lurid nowadays than it used to be, but it 
is probably much more widespread among all 
classes, even the higher-thinking classes, of our 
country. So much so that present-day novels of 
contemporary life, even many of those written by 
the sex which never swears, are sprinkled, and 
often liberally, with profane expletives. Now I 
am free to say that this does not startle me when 
I see or hear it, as it seems to startle and even to 
horrify some of my fellow-Christians. I have 
worked alongside of men that were constantly and 



40 THE WAR WITHIN 

unconsciously profane, and consequently I know 
very well that there is no blasphemy or even 
irreverence intended in most of the oaths we hear. 
The motive for them is ordinarily the desire to 
"go with the crowd." The men who use the 
capital D, which is the sum of profanity for most, 
use it because their fellows use it — only that and 
nothing more! The profane word does not shock 
me therefore by its abysmal sinfulness: it pains 
me by the lack of individuality and the down- 
right weakness it betrays. 

A similar judgment should be passed upon the 
use of tobacco, which is also far more common 
among all classes than it was formerly, and this 
not because more need it or even, I am disposed 
to think, because more really care for it, but again 
because it is a way of "going with the crowd." 
Men smoke, some of your best friends and mine 
tell us as much, for sociability, or "so as not to 
be odd." I have not the least intention of saying 
that smoking as such is wrong — that is a matter 
for each man to decide for himself — but to smoke 
merely to be one of "the crowd" is, to my mind, 
one of the poorest justifications for the habit that 
could be alleged. How often we have observed 
out of the corner of our eye the Freshman making 
painful efforts, efforts worthy of a better cause, to 



GOING WITH THE CROWD 41 

learn to smoke. It turns his stomach. He takes 
no pleasure in it, much as he hopes he may in some 
dim future. Why then does he struggle so strenu- 
ously to harden himself to it? Why, simply for 
this: he sees a pipe hanging from the mouth of 
practically every Sophomore, and he wants to have 
a pipe hanging out of his silly head too. If he 
would be frank — and he often is as regards this — 
he would tell you that he really thinks it is "the 
thing" and that is his sole reason for trying to 
smoke. Now I can respect a man who likes to 
smoke and cannot see that it does him or anybody 
else any harm, and is bound to smoke, accordingly, 
whether you approve of it or not. I can respect 
that man for his independence of mind though I 
cannot say I am in the least attracted to go and 
do likewise. But to smoke merely and only because 
the crowd smokes is far from being the manly 
thing small boys and college men and sometimes 
even mature fathers of families frequently think. 
On the contrary, to have no opinion of one's own 
which one can and will stand by shows a lamentable 
lack of stamina. Follow your leader is a good 
game but a poor motto for life and life-habits. 

Or look elsewhere. In the discussions and ex- 
pressions of views which are always coming up, 
how easy it is to fall in with the generally current 
feeling and how hard to be and remain on the 



42 THE WAR WITHIN 

other side. Do you invariably stand up and 
speak out what you think in your lodge, in your 
men's brotherhood, in your committee of what- 
ever sort ? At all events it is not a pleasant course 
to pursue. If you do not agree with the prevailing 
opinion, does it not frequently happen that you 
say nothing and even keep your seat when a vote 
is taken? Oh the courage there is in rising and 
voting alone, when the rest are to a man against 
you! But hard though it is, that is the vote that 
one can be sure means something. I always 
respect deeply, and so do you, the single dissident 
who is not afraid to go against "the crowd.' ' 

So with church-going in these latter days, when 
nobody feels any more a real obligation and duty 
to be involved. When the family say, one after 
the other, some Sunday morning, "I'm not going 
to church today," what do you say? Ah it is 
surely difficult, is it not, to reply with any other 
words than "Well, perhaps I won't go either." It 
is the person who, alone out of all the house, 
trudges off to service, who proves himself or herself 
to have real strength of character. That person's 
religion amounts to something for he has not staid 
at home "with the crowd." 

Evil influences know and rely upon this tendency 
of human nature to "go with the crowd." See 
how the bosses use it to their own advantage. 



GOING WITH THE CROWD 43 

Look at the smooth-running political machines 
which work almost automatically. Do we realize 
that they live, move, and have their being only 
because of our American disinclination to act alone? 
The great mass of Democrats will vote the demo- 
cratic ticket and the great mass of Republicans 
will vote the republican ticket. There is too 
much, in the politics of too many men, of "my 
party, right or wrong." It is the stalwarts who 
make political machines possible. Professional 
politicians never take to the independents or in- 
surgents of whatever sort they may be. They 
make fun of them, they caricature them, they jeer 
at them, they call them names, such as "mug- 
wumps," "goo-goos," "theorists and dreamers," 
or often "Socialists." They urge everybody to 
"get on the band-wagon." But whatever the 
politicians may say and however their livelihood 
is endangered, it would be better for our country 
if more voters were mugwumps and goo-goos and 
all the rest. Our national affairs would be much 
better managed if "going with the crowd" in 
politics were to become less the usual thing than 
it still largely is. 

Even the criminal classes of the community 
use now and then our pr oneness to "go with the 
crowd." The harm of it appears in darker colors 



44 THE WAR WITHIN 

when we hear of an incident which was chronicled 
in the daily papers a year or two ago. It happened 
in New York on West 57th Street, or thereabouts. 
In broad daylight a passer-by was set upon by two 
thieves who clubbed him savagely and robbed him. 
All the while the windows and house-entrances 
were filled with frightened women and men, yes 
men! They all regretted the situation of the 
victim, they all would have been glad to help him 
in some way, but none dared to be the first to 
run to the rescue. So they watched, a frightened 
company — until the victim was dead and the rob- 
bers escaped, and all because every onlooker staid 
"with the crowd." 

I have no wish to wear you out with illustrations. 
You grasp the idea already, I am sure. You may 
look at the large or at the small things of life. You 
may look in any direction you will. Everywhere 
you find that there is a subtle pull downward in 
"going with the crowd." It is weakening, it is 
dangerous, but it is very common. The fact is — 
and this is the philosophical basis of it all — we 
all of us will discover among our temptations the 
temptation to be average people. It is easy to have 
ideals and to live up to them if only they are the 
ideals of "the crowd." We do not beat our wives. 
We never play ball on Sunday. We not even dream 



GOING WITH THE CROWD 45 

of mixing sand with the sugar. We go to church now 
and then, especially at Easter or Christmas and at 
other times when churches are thronged. We help 
charities about as is expected of us. We do what 
everybody does and we carefully avoid what every- 
body condemns. We are, as we sometimes say of 
ourselves, "as good as the next man." Ah there 
is a mighty tendency to be average people! But 
no man is developing, no man is all he should be 
except in some regards he rises above the average. 
If we intend to be of use to ourselves or, still more, 
to others, we shall have to do more than "go with 
the crowd." God asks you and me to be: not as 
good as our neighbor, but at times decidedly better; 
not like dumb, driven cattle, but firm, strong indi- 
viduals with our own opinions and our own acts; 
not like Peter who could not endure being differ- 
ent, but like Jesus who came to do the will not of 
man but of his Father who is in heaven ! 



THE WORLD AS A PICNIC-GROUND 



THERE are many people in this world who have 
gained somehow the idea that the meaning 
of life is summed up in the one word " pleasure." 
They look upon their existence and judge it as 
they would judge a concert, a game, a recreation. 
They sit back, that is, and expect to be amused, 
to be provided with a "good time" in every sense 
of the phrase. If they are rich, they buy pleasure 
— all they can procure! They spend their money 
freely on parties and luxuries, on pleasurings and 
jaunts all over this country and Europe. If in this 
way they are successful in enjoying themselves, 
they are perfectly satisfied. In so far as they are 
being pleasurably entertained for the passing mo- 
ment, they ask nothing, literally nothing more 
from life. 

If perchance they are only in comfortable cir- 
cumstances, they cannot purchase their "good 
times" in quite the lavish fashion of the idle rich, 
but they do their best to that end. They are 
present at every amusement that offers itself in 
their city, avoiding all the more serious demands 
by saying: "Oh, I can't afford it," or "I haven't 
an evening to spare." No! they think they have 
not money or time, but they have sufficient of 

49 



50 THE WAR WITHIN 

both to join several clubs and lodges, being very 
careful to select those that exist purely for good- 
fellowship and pleasant surroundings. 

Or if, unhappily for them, they are not in even 
moderately comfortable circumstances; if they are 
poor men and women compelled to do without 
most if not all of the enjoyments money can buy: 
then they take it out in sulking and finding fault. 
They feel themselves defrauded and they threaten 
to be anarchists or even to leave a world which 
refuses to them what it grants to others of luxuries 
and pleasures, and in some cases they do actually 
carry out their childish threats. How often such 
sullen, querulous moods come upon those who have 
but little ! We all have experienced these feelings, 
aye, and yielded to them as we should not have 
yielded. There is, by the way, a long, skilful study 
of a sustained character of this type to be found 
in Mr. Thomas Hardy's most bitter and disagree- 
able novel entitled Jude the Obscure. 

Now all such people — the pleasure-seekers and 
the pleasure-wishers alike — are committing a great 
error. That error lies not in what they do or feel ; 
it lies not chiefly in their selfishness and ignoring 
of others: it is to be found in the idea, the fixed 
obsession which is upon them, that life is theirs 
for pleasure, and that it ought consequently to 



THE WORLD AS A PICNIC-GROUND 51 

yield pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, from one end of 
it to the other. Their mistake is that they are so 
absolutely sure that the world is a picnic-ground. 
It is this idea rather than anything they may say 
or do that should be attacked and refuted, for it 
is this which is the key to the whole situation. If 
the assumption of these persons is correct; if life 
was intended to be a long round of pleasure; if 
existence was meant to be one " grand, sweet song" 
and nothing more : then they are right in pursuing 
enjoyment first and foremost. If the world is a 
picnicking-place, then they are sensible to make 
life as much of a picnic as ever they can, and to 
curse God if the thing cannot be done. But if the 
world is not a picnic-ground? What if a "good 
time" is not the proper final end of existence? 
Why then, plainly, they and we too ought to know 
the fact and wake up to it! 

In point of fact, the moment one begins to con- 
sider the question, that moment one must discard 
this axiom of the pleasure-seeker. First of all the 
best men, those recognized as the greatest ones of 
earth have never been the ones whose lives sought 
and attained most of pleasure. The great men of 
history have been those who were great in char- 
acter and accomplished much in the service of the 
world. Nor need one appeal to great men par- 



52 THE WAR WITHIN 

ticularly, in this respect. Anybody can settle this 
for himself from the people he meets every day. 
The pleasure-seekers are genial and agreeable. 
You can pass a few moments very pleasantly with 
them. But you don't respect them as you respect 
some others who do not know how to be a tithe 
as courteous and urbane. The pleasure-seekers of 
earth are, to tell the truth, a flabby, degenerate 
lot. One never dreams of seeking them out when 
one is in trouble or in real need of help of any kind. 
They are all very well in blue-sky weather, but in 
the storm and stress of human anguish they are as 
much out of place as a butterfly in a blizzard. 
They are not adapted to the world as the world on 
some days is, and that fact is one indication that 
the world is not the picnic-ground they take it to 
be. If it were what they assume, they would surely 
be among the greatest, the ablest, the wisest of its 
inhabitants ! 

Again, we may be certain the earth was not con- 
structed as a pleasure-house, in that every attempt 
at pleasure as such so soon fails of its object. The 
pleasure-seekers not only fail to be the great ones 
of the world: they fail, worst of all, of the only 
end they set before them: they miss pleasure more 
than any other class of men and women. Strange, 
is it not, that the experts in pleasure should 



THE WORLD AS A PICNIC-GROUND 53 

succeed the least in finding it, but so it is! The 
life that consciously aims at " having a good time" 
will because of that very effort never, never really 
attain that end. The most discontented, unhappy 
men and women that I know and that you know 
are those that have struggled strenuously and spent 
all their substance in the search for enjoyment, 
and all in vain, while on the other hand, the most 
contented, happy people are those who have left 
the question of their own pleasure out of account 
all their lives. It is paradoxical but it is true that 
if you want to be happy, if you are desirous of 
having real pleasure and satisfaction in life, the 
first requisite is never to try to have it, always to 
ignore it utterly. This is a simple fact of life, a 
bedrock truth as to the world in which we live. 
Surely it lends no support to the idea that the 
world is meant for a picnic-ground. It seems, 
much rather to indicate that pleasure is not the 
"real thing" in this world, but only a subordinate 
matter — a mere dish of bonbons passed around 
between the acts of life. 

But supposing both the considerations to which 
allusion has been made bore in the other direction. 
Supposing, ridiculous though the supposition is, 
that the most conspicuous characteristics of the 
greatest men were their pleasures. Supposing too 



54 THE WAR WITHIN 

that a "good time" in life could be gained, as cer- 
tainly it cannot, by direct effort after it. Yet even 
then, the world could not be assumed to be a mere 
picnic-place, for the fact would remain that pleas- 
ure is not a fit end and goal of this wonderful world 
of mankind. The dog has all he wants if he has 
pleasure; he wags his tail in deep content as he 
gnaws his bone; but we are not dogs. The bird 
desires nothing more as he sings with pleasure in 
the sunshine " tuning his merry note"; but we are 
not birds. We all have a degree of pleasure in 
good food, in good company, in good fooling; but 
pleasure like this, good enough in its place, cannot 
suffice us permanently. We are soon cloyed if this 
be all. The healthy normal human being wants 
also — he will in time insist on having — exercise, 
effort, work. Sooner or later every man comes to 
realize that life with nothing but itself to live for 
is not worth living at all! Pleasure satisfies for 
the moment, but men of experience, yes, even men 
of pleasure, discover at last that the life that saves 
itself has lost itself, and that he who loses his life, 
letting it go for some noble cause or in some other 
fashion for the good of others, has alone saved it, 
has alone really lived a life worth anything even 
to himself. Pleasure is all very well but it is not 
sufficient occupation for men that are men, and 



THE WORLD AS A PICNIC-GROUND 55 

for women that have wakened to a true knowledge 
of what womanhood is. 

The world is not a picnic-ground because it is 
something far, far better. It is a gymnasium for 
the hardening of our spiritual muscles. It is a 
race-track to develop our powers of endurance. 
It is an arena where we may meet and buffet and 
lay the specters of brutishness and selfishness 
within and without us. It is a university where 
we are taught, sometimes by easy things, more 
often by hard exigencies and tasks, what life is and 
ought to be. There are many many metaphors 
which apply most patly to the world in which we 
are, but whatever else the world may be, it never 
is a mere picnicking-place ! Do not dally with that 
assumption. Put that out of your mind once for all. 
May your dreams be of something more vital, more 
manly, more womanly than pleasure ! Never allow 
yourself to act as though you were seeking to be 
able to say at the ending of life, " It has all been very 
pleasant and entertaining." Do not live with the 
apparent aim of saying at the last what Mr. Roose- 
velt declared, in a flippant mood at the close of his 
term of office, " I've had a corking good time ! " No, 
no ! so act, so live that you may cry out with truth at 
the last, with Paul, "I have fought the good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith!" 



THE SIN OF EXCLUSIVENESS 



EXCLUSIVENESS takes many forms — some of 
them obvious, some of them not so obvious. 
There is first, social exclusiveness, that pettiest form 
of exclusiveness which refuses to associate with 
people outside one's set. Men and, more often, 
women will say they do not care to enlarge their 
circle of acquaintance. They will put up barriers to 
keep apart themselves, their children, their family, 
from others — "out-siders" as they call them. They 
will attend over and over the most inane and weari- 
some of teas and receptions and be happy through 
them all because, as they assure one another in 
asides, "This is a most exclusive affair I" Despite 
all pretensions, this sort of behavior is nothing more 
nor less than the old dog-in-the-manger selfishness. 
It clings to what others have not, for no reason 
in the world except that others have it not. It 
reminds one of the spirit of the older theology 
of a hundred and fifty years ago, which asserted 
that the joys of the redeemed in heaven will be 
heightened by the clear view they will have of the 
miseries of the damned! The joys of society are 
for some narrow souls much like that, the only 
difference being that those who are shut out from 
such "exclusive" gatherings are not at all miser- 

59 



60 THE WAR WITHIN 

able. In fact, unless they are infected with the 
same unsympathetic spirit, most normal men and 
women prefer to be outside rather than inside 
that which delights to call itself the "exclusive 
circle." We harm others to a degree by marking 
out dividing lines and laying so much weight upon 
the matter of belonging to "our set," but we hurt 
ourselves incalculably more by making our lives 
thus narrow and dwindling and insignificant. 
After all, social exclusiveness is not so much wrong 
— though of course it is that — as it is foolish and 
ridiculous. The proper reply to it is not argument 
but uncontrolled Homeric laughter ! 

This matter of cliques and limited coteries is, 
however, of rare occurrence if one takes all man- 
kind into account. Those insufferable personages 
who turn up their noses at ordinary people are but 
few and far between. The average city-dwellers, 
the average men and women we meet every day 
in the store, on the street, in the electric car, know 
no such deep-lying distinctions and separations. 
They feel together. They help each the other in 
case of need. They have in general a glowing and 
precious sense of social solidarity. We are not our 
own ! Most of us are aware of it and are the better 
for it. 

More common than social exclusiveness is what 



THE SIN OF EXCLUSIVENESS 61 

may be called exclusiveness in enjoyment. I refer 
to the luxurious appreciation of the good things 
of life joined with an utter forgetting and constant 
ignoring of others to whom such luxuries, and often 
many a necessity also, are impossible. There is 
poverty, misery, soddenness, in this world of ours. 
Those who are awake thrill to such reminders as 
the following, of which there are many nowadays: 

I see humanity scattered over the world, depressed, conflict- 
ing, unawakened. I see human life as avoidable waste and 
curable confusion. I see peasants living in wretched huts, knee- 
deep in manure, mere parasites on their own pigs and cows. 
I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial perfection. 
.... Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility fills me 
with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to develop 
understanding.* 

but how many there are in this present age who are 
not filled with that " passionate desire" of Mr. 
Wells, who are oblivious of any need for sympathy 
and assistance. Our cities are filled with men and 
women who spend money to the right and to the 
left lavishly, for apartments filled to overflowing 
with conveniences and fine furniture, for rich food 
and entertainments and travel, for themselves from 
first to last. They do not possess everything they 
would like — who does ? — but they have much that 
others have to do without, and the deprivations 

* H. G. Wells, quoted in R. B. Perry, The Moral Economy, p. 167. 



62 THE WAR WITHIN 

of those others never occur to them for a moment. 
In how many hotels of pampered luxury, in how 
many comfortable residence-communities, in how 
many happy homes of America, is there to be 
observed an all-absorbing devotion to the comfort 
of oneself and one's family, and an entire ignorance 
and lack of interest so far as everything and every- 
body else is concerned. This too is an outcropping 
of the sin of exclusiveness ! I do not say what we 
should do. I do not say with Tolstoi that we 
should put aside all our luxuries. But I do say 
that we should be conscious of others as well as of 
ourselves. I do believe that we err if we are 
unaware of others' troubles and are thus neutral 
and unsympathetic in view of the terrible social 
problems which exist, whether we overlook them 
or not. To enjoy unthinkingly is a cruelty and 
a sin, perhaps unconscious but no less real. 

Again the sin of exclusiveness is committed, as 
it seems to me, in the exaggerated idea of personal 
ownership which is very widely current in many 
quarters and which is in many respects one of the 
" idols of the market-place" of our time. Men 
have the feeling, multitudes of them, that what a 
man owns is his to use absolutely as he pleases. 
He inherited it perhaps. That settles it! He can 
hoard it, he can corner wheat with it, he can throw 



THE SIN OF EXCLUSIVENESS 63 

it to the dogs, just as he sees fit ! He has a perfect 
right to do with it according to any wish or even 
caprice which for the moment is in the saddle. 
Still more is this felt to be obvious when the 
fortune in question was laid up by its present 
possessor. Many a " self-made" millionaire — as 
the phrase goes — will reason in somewhat this wise : 
"I earned this money of mine dollar by dollar. I 
made it by my own hard efforts. I know I ought 
to be decently charitable now and then of course, 
but when one reaches the bedrock facts of the case, 
my houses, my stocks, my bank-accounts are abso- 
lutely, utterly, irrevocably mine. Mr. Carnegie 
may give away all he has before he dies, as he 
seems to intend, if he is so disposed. Kennedy 
may leave his possessions to various boards for 
the public good, if that is where he wishes his 
money to go. But what's mine's my own ! I will 
use it for myself while I live, and I will leave 
it entirely to my family after I am gone and it 
is nobody's business!" How is it as to such 
reasoning ? Is it not true that every considerable 
fortune rests back upon the social foundations? 
Could it come into existence without the protec- 
tion, the laws, the policing of government ? Sup- 
pose there were no Christian civilization with its 
mutual forbearance, its social consciousness, its 



64 THE WAR WITHIN 

sense of justice: could any great fortune under 
such circumstances be earned or saved or used? 
So when the rich man says, "This which I hold is 
mine!" he is legally correct, but morally incorrect. 
"Ye are not your own!" In the eyes of God 
neither a man nor still more his possessions are 
exclusively his to do with as he sees fit. 

Let me illustrate this which may be called 
proper ty-exclusiveness by two applications. Look 
first at the conflict, all too frequent in these days, 
between capital and labor. Labor asserts often, 
for example, to itself if not publicly, "We have a 
right to as few hours' work at as high wages as we 
can get. Our labor is our own! We will sell it 
therefore in the dearest possible market!" There 
is, is there not, a sense in which the workingman 
should take to heart the words, "Ye are not your 
own!" Yet it must be added that labor has been 
so often and so long oppressed and exploited, that 
if it did not cherish exaggerated claims, it would 
not gain many of its undoubted rights. So that 
the classic and inexcusable exclusiveness in this 
conflict is to be discovered rather with the capitalist 
who when a strike occurs, treats with his men for 
a time, and then loses his temper and throws down 
the gauntlet in some such words as, "This busi- 
ness is mine! It is for me to say whether it is to 



THE SIN OF EXCLUSIVENESS 65 

be an open or a union shop! I shall pay what 
wages I think best and I shall take no dictation or 
advice of any kind. There's nothing to arbitrate!" 
Now such a claim to exclusive control is based on 
an erroneous idea. Capital owns the factory or 
the mine or the railroad, it is true; capital is neces- 
sary to keep the business moving: but capital is 
not the only necessity, it is not consequently the 
only partner in the transaction. How long could 
any industry continue if there were no employes ? 
How long would it be profitable — we are just be- 
ginning to grasp this aspect of the situation — if 
there were no consumers? All three, capital, 
labor, consumer, and ultimately society itself are 
concerned in every battle between workers and 
employers, and therefore all three and society above 
all must have a voice in the matter. "Ye are not 
your own!" Let great businesses heed the words. 
A second application of the thought is possible 
as regards this same subject of private ownership's 
exclusive claims. I refer to the mooted rights of 
property in matters of legislation. The holding 
of property and its protection is certainly in many 
ways wise and necessary. Government every- 
where sees here a real and important function to be 
performed. But property as such is not, so far 
as the government is concerned, an end: it is, 



66 THE WAR WITHIN 

properly speaking, a means to such values as thrift, 
prudence, self-respect, responsibility. The rights of 
property are real and unquestionable so long as it 
furthers these, but the fact of possessing property 
confers no final and inalienable privilege upon the 
property-holder. Government exists not for prop- 
erty, but for man, and wherever the rights and 
privileges of property conflict with the rights of 
man there is no question which must yield. "Ye 
are not your own!" That is a necessary govern- 
mental maxim which should be commended to the 
notice of selfish property-holders. The Lords of 
England may grieve over the recent budget. 
They may call it confiscation to impose a tax 
upon their lands. But they are mistaken in their 
contention, mistaken because their thousands of 
unutilized acres are not finally and absolutely 
theirs. So with the outcry against publicity and 
liability laws for corporations, against govern- 
mental regulation of freight rates, etc., etc. They 
are termed sometimes " unwarrantable intrusions" 
and " meddlings with business." They are that 
however only if business is "its own." But that 
is the very point! In God's sight no business, no 
corporation, no man or body of men is its own. 
Government is just coming within sight of the 
divine truth upon this question. Property is not 



THE SIN OF EXCLUSIVENESS 67 

a " crime" as certain socialist thinkers have 
asserted. But property, if hugged to oneself, will 
decay as the manna in the wilderness decayed 
over night. Property if regarded as literally and 
under all circumstances one's own, in defiance of 
government regulations and the public welfare, 
property at such times may be not a " crime," but 
a sin — the sin, in short, of exclusiveness. Before 
God, and sooner or later in law too, men will have 
to recognize and concede that they exist and their 
possessions accumulate, not for themselves and 
their own pleasure alone, nor for the sense of power 
which the brandishing of wealth affords to them or 
their families. Men are and have simply and only 
that they and all men may grow in grace and 
manhood and the possibilities of life. 

Do we not begin to see the scope, the sweep of 
the sin of exclusiveness ? " Ye are not your own I" 
To regard oneself as separate, self-sufficient, self- 
possessing, is to divide man from man. It is to 
rend the unity in which "God hath made of one 
blood all men that dwell on the face of the earth." 
To be exclusive, whether it be in a narrower or a 
broader sense, is to withdraw oneself from the 
current of broad human brotherhood and sym- 
pathy and responsibility; it is to live such lives 
as men were never meant to live; it is to put asun- 



68 THE WAR WITHIN 

der what God hath joined together. We are all 
"in the same boat": rich and poor, wise and 
ignorant, happy and miserable. We are members 
one of another. We are not our own! We must 
seek to achieve not for ourselves only, but for all, 
life, happiness, manhood, womanhood. We pro- 
claim no longer the equality of men. Men are 
not equal; they never were and they never will be! 
We do not emphasize nor pursue any such chimera. 
But there is an equality the Christian will and must, 
by virtue of his Christianity, insist upon. It is 
the equality of moral life and freedom. It is the 
equality of proper education. It is the equality of 
start. It is the equality of opportunity for every 
varying individual to develop what he is and what 
he can do, according to the plan God put within 
him. That sort of equality of men is the goal, not 
of the poor and ignorant, not of those who are 
down, alone, but of us all. We are not our own! 
We belong each to the rest. We seek not our own 
welfare or character most. No! we seek the right 
life of all. Our aim is not individual but social 
salvation ! 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPER- 
FLUITIES 



JESUS said once that a man's life consisteth not 
in the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth. But there are, for all that, all too 
many who think so. The wealthy with their 
lavish display, their extravagant recreations, their 
ostentatious spending — they are, some of them at 
least, of the firm opinion that a man's life does 
consist in the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth! The investor with his money at work 
in this or that corporation is sometimes guilty 
of thinking so. There is the reason why trusts 
and syndicates are at times so unscrupulous in 
manipulating the laws and some of the legislators; 
so cruel upon the children; so ruthless in demand- 
ing more production and in " speeding up," what- 
ever betide. Corporations have, it is said, no 
souls, and apart from past watering of stock, the 
cause of it very frequently is the average investor 
who insists upon dividends, dividends and ever 
more and higher dividends. Such investors are of 
the opinion that a man's life does decidedly con- 
sist of the abundance of the things which he 
possesseth! There is a type of politician who 
thinks so. It is the politician who " stands pat" 
for his own or his constituents' gain. He dares 

71 



72 THE WAR WITHIN 

not oppose the financial powers that be, not even 
for the public good. He votes a tariff on wool 
which brings hardship upon the poor and he votes 
down the parcels post which the nation sorely 
needs — all these and other harmful deeds he is 
sometimes guilty of because, as one of his ilk in 
New York once declared, he is " working for his 
pocket all the time!" His belief beyond a doubt 
is that a man's life consists in the abundance of 
the things which he possesseth. 

More important than all the rest, the everyday 
man is too prone to think so. See how he estimates 
his acquaintances, looking not at the talents of a 
man but at his salary, not at his character but at 
his income, not at his value to the community but 
at his stocks or lands or mines. Is it not much 
too significant that, for common parlance, a man 
is " worth" just the amount of his convertible 
securities, no more and no less! The life-ideal of 
too many young men is to have money and the 
life-ideal of too many young women is to have the 
things money can buy — the more the better. It 
is a prevalent belief — you will see it appearing if 
you will watch the deeds of those about you and 
sometimes, I fear if you will watch your own deeds 
— it is a commonplace of this world we inhabit, 
that a man's life consisteth of the abundance of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPERFLUITIES 73 

the things which he possesseth! It is on this 
account that this generation is often called, and 
with much truth, materialistic: not because it is 
occupied largely with material things, but because 
it is occupied with little else; not because it seeks 
and toils for physical necessities but because it 
seeks and agonizes for more and more things ad 
infinitum! 

The vital mistake in all this mad rush for things 
lies not in the effort after things as such but in the 
quantity of things desired. It is obvious that 
everybody must have various things if he is to 
live physically at all. A person must plainly earn 
a certain minimum income if that person's life is 
to be on a plane above that of the brutes. The 
struggles of men and women to earn a livelihood 
are justifiable and praiseworthy. Similarly the 
aim of social workers and publicists to raise the 
standard of living of the poor and the submerged 
and the improvident is in no wise to be branded 
as materialistic: it is on the contrary prompted 
and continued by a most noble and useful idealism. 
A modicum of possessions is decidedly necessary 
to human existence — necessary because we are not 
souls only but bodies with bodily needs also. It 
is not the effort for things that should be con- 
demned. Jesus has nothing to say against that 



74 THE WAR WITHIN 

effort in the words I have cited or anywhere else. 
Life consists partly of things. Jesus has no thought 
of denying it. What he affirms is that life does 
not consist of the abundance of the things one 
possesses. We must all pay considerable atten- 
tion to the things we need, but, Jesus implies, we 
should take no particular interest in having more 
than we need. When our income suffices, when 
our souls are not stunted by the lack of any 
material necessities, then things should cease to 
have importance for us, then the straining soul 
and body for more things is foolishness pure and 
simple. Is it not true ? We can see a justification 
for the grim earnestness with which a father will 
strive to earn or even, if that be impossible to beg 
or steal a loaf for his starving little ones. But can 
we see any excuse for that man living in luxury 
who lets himself be bribed by from $800 to $1000 
— a thing which has occurred in more than one 
state of our country of late ! We can comprehend 
how a factory-hand on wages of $8 or $10 a week, 
might do extra work nights even to the injury of 
his health, in order that he might keep a promising 
son in school. But can we quite admire the com- 
mon sense — to say the least — of others who take 
on heavy additional burdens merely because they 
cannot afford, as they think, to let go this or that 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPERFLUITIES 75 

opportunity for money-making? Financial con- 
siderations may move, ought in fact to move a 
person in actual poverty, but that they should 
influence men who are in no sort of pressing need 
is simply indefensible. 

The sad fact nowadays is precisely this, that so 
many of the sharp, crooked, corrupt doings in busi- 
ness and in politics are pushed through not by the 
indigent but by the well-fed, not by those that have 
nothing but by those who have already consider- 
ably more than is good for them. There is an 
earnest striving for the necessities of life in these 
days, but it is small in comparison with the effort 
to pile up heaps of money for the spending of 
degenerate sons and daughters. There is a bitter 
cry of the poor for bread, and the cry moves us 
to pity and charity, but the most clamorous 
chorus just now is not for bread but for cake! 
There is a struggle for existence and hard and 
grinding it is, but the struggle for existence is 
nothing to the struggle for superfluities! The toil 
in many quarters is not for things but for an 
abundance of things somehow, anyhow! Covet- 
ousness is the very meaning of life to multitudes 
of people in this generation, high and low, rich 
and middle-class alike. 

A yearning for the superfluous will not cure 



76 THE WAR WITHIN 

itself. There are some desires which have natural 
limits. The hog has a mighty appetite, he wants 
more and more and more food, but he cannot 
devour indefinitely. There is a point reached at 
last where he can contain nothing further. He 
dislikes to cease, his whole hoggish being protests 
against it, but he must give over for the time. 
Gluttony has its natural limit set. But there is 
no limit to covetousness. People in ordinary cir- 
cumstances can spend, in one way or another, all 
the money they can lay their hands on. And even 
though one is wealthy to such an extent that one's 
income swamps the possibility of spending it, yet 
money can, even so, be hoarded and invested 
absolutely without end. There is no automatic 
check to the struggle for superfluities. It would 
be advantageous for humanity if there were, but 
there is none! Covetousness never ceases of itself; 
it only grows by that it feeds upon. The only 
method of being rid of it is for each one to crush 
it within himself. 

It may assist our resolute hostility to this sin 
if we consider two reasons why men should put 
away their strugglings for unnecessaries. There 
is, first, the selfish motive. Covetousness is 
nothing more nor less than folly. All this desire 
for more and more and more things is a desire for 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPERFLUITIES 77 

what will add nothing to life or liberty or happi- 
ness. Men are not really better or worse off in 
proportion as they have greater or less abundance 
of things. Our wealthiest men are not our most 
enviable citizens. Look at Mr. Rockefeller to 
whom our minds naturally recur when one speaks 
of rich men. Mr. Rockefeller has laid up, with 
infinite pains, hundreds of millions of dollars and 
now, for he means well, he has come in sight of 
the no less weary task of dispersing what he can 
of that money, with no less infinite pains ! Would 
it not have been better — from a merely selfish 
standpoint, to say nothing of any love for mankind 
— not to have laid up that immense fortune in the 
first place ? As with the wealthy, so with us all. 
You cannot rate men, in value or even in happiness, 
according to their abundance of possessions. And 
you, yes you yourself, doubt it as you will, would 
be no more useful and no more acquainted with 
the joy of living if you had more things than you 
have now — supposing, what is probably the case, 
that you are not in actual poverty. A man's life 
consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
which he possesseth! It is a crazy gluttony, a 
silly mania, this desire for more and more things 
without end. 
Again there is against covetousness not only the 



78 THE WAR WITHIN 

appeal to self-interest: there is the appeal to one's 
regard for one's fellows. For the sake of our 
times we should crush covetousness. Do we 
realize as we should, that it is the struggles of men 
like you and me for things that are unnecessary 
that render money the sinister foe of human welfare 
it has in many cases become? Most men, almost 
any man, will respond with startling suddenness 
to the offer of more money. Whether one is really 
in need of it or not, that bait is usually profoundly 
attractive and stirring. And therefore, therefore, 
money is a power, one of the greatest powers in 
these United States today. Money is not in 
itself, you see, a mighty social force. It becomes 
so only because we all want it, more of it without 
any limit. We ought not to find financial ad- 
vantage so altogether irresistible as we do. We 
know at heart that we ought not, for we grasp at 
once the greatness of a man who rises superior to 
his pocket-book. There was Professor Agassiz, a 
Harvard teacher, who represents the spirit of that 
oldest and best of our universities much better 
than some parts of our country realize. Professor 
Agassiz was approached one day, so the story goes, 
by a lecture agent and invited to tour the country 
delivering a series of addresses which it was cer- 
tain, in view of his fame, would be largely attended. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPERFLUITIES 79 

Professor Agassiz excused himself, referring to 
press of work and investigations. "But," urged 
the manager, "this will mean a large sum of 
money for you!" "I have no time to make 
money!" was the prompt reply. Do we not stir 
instinctively to the noble spirit of that response? 
Suppose we all not only admired but exemplified 
that same spirit; suppose we desired merely a 
reasonable scale of living; suppose the average 
man having sufficient food and clothing and shelter 
were to reply to proffers of more money, to bribes 
and financial allurements of every description, "I 
don't need and I don't want your money!" Suppose 
in short, that money should lose its universal 
appeal: why then is it not clear that the power of 
money would shrink at once to a mere ghost of its 
former self? It would still be mighty in the ma- 
terial and physical world, but it would lose in that 
instant its potency and prestige so far as mankind 
is concerned. Men would no longer sell their very 
souls to acquire it and consequently many of the 
evils of these times would vanish away. The 
adulterations of foods, extortionate prices, political 
jobbery, the saloon business, the " white slave" 
traffic, indecent plays, and brutalizing yellow 
journalism — all these and many other abuses like 
them would have no reason for existing and would 



80 THE WAR WITHIN 

cease to be instantly, for they are all due to some- 
body's, everybody's, desire for more money. If 
ordinary men did not want money and the super- 
fluous things money will buy, more and more and 
more of them, then money would not be the prize 
of everyday life, the symbol of success it is at 
present, and strong men would no longer pile it 
up as they often do now, to the harm and injury 
of every citizen of the land. 

This is all a dream and a mere Utopia, no doubt. 
As things are, men are moved powerfully by the 
prospect of cash returns and will be so moved for 
a long time to come. But though that is quite 
true, it is also true that every individual who puts 
aside a mad rush for superfluities, as regards him- 
self, has lessened the baleful allurement of money 
to just that degree. He has cast his weight at 
least against the appeal of more things, and in 
favor of man and God. And let us remember this: 
until the nobler and better-minded people decline, 
on principle, to live for an abundance of things, 
there is little hope that the great mass of mankind 
will do so. Men should abhor covetousness for 
the sake of their times if not for themselves, for 
the good of their weaker fellows if not for very 
self-respect! The struggle for superfluities, the 
insatiable desire for increased possessions is a life- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPERFLUITIES 81 

meaning of our day and of many more of us than 
probably realize it. Oh, why may not the right- 
intentioned and higher-thinking elements of the 
community in their comfortable homes, why may 
not you and I rise above money considerations? 
Why cannot a few of us at all events realize once 
for all that our lives are not to be measured and 
ought not to be swerved by the possibility of 
possessing a greater abundance of material things? 
Let us do our part that ours may not be of those 
nations "where wealth accumulates, and men 
decay"! 



THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 



THE separating of men into two classes, the one 
called sheep and the other goats is in a para- 
ble of Jesus conceived as done by the Son of Man 
and as occurring at the end of the world. Such a 
classifying of men, so far as the Bible goes, is by 
implication, therefore, not the province of the aver- 
age man nor, even if it were, a matter of the pres- 
ent time. Yet the division of men into sheep and 
goats has gone merrily on from the beginning of 
things. It is an industry which has never known 
apparently any dull times. Men have ever been 
and still are labeling their fellows most unwar- 
rantably and most cruelly. 

Historically a most interesting resume might be 
made of the various methods and results of dividing 
people into sheep and goats. It teases one's 
thought merely to mention a few instances. There 
was the old Jewish belief in their nation as "the 
chosen people" over against the heathen. Spring- 
ing from that as a root appears the later arrogance 
of the Jew which especially expressed itself in his 
aversion and scorn for the Samaritan, and the 
gentile in general. In St. Paul, reaching back to 
the same origin, but christianized, the foreordina- 
tion of the righteous was mentioned and rejoiced 

8s 



86 THE WAR WITHIN 

in, but with no thought whatever of asserting that 
the unrighteous were also foreordained to be such, 
so that we may absolve this liberal thinker from 
the hateful division of men into sheep and goats. 
Yet on this Pauline foundation Calvinism in time 
came to teach the harmful, pitiless doctrine that 
a few are the elect while the great majority are the 
non-elect, or to put it positively as Calvinism had 
no hesitation in doing, some are predestined for 
salvation but more, a vast number more, are fore- 
ordained for hell-fire. Is not this plainly a division, 
presumptuous and premature, of men into the sheep 
and the goats? Nor was this cruel procedure 
limited to Jewish and Christian history. It ap- 
pears, and far more harshly in other quarters. 
There was the distinction in classical antiquity 
between Greek and barbarian, and between Roman 
citizen and freedman. Most sharply the thing is 
found in India of the past and the present, where 
the inhuman institution of caste with its innumer- 
able gradations is interwoven into the very bases 
of society. 

Not that these dividings-off of men have not 
been challenged. They have been condemned and 
bitterly attacked sooner or later at every stage in 
every historical case. Among the Jews of the Old 
Testament times, it was the prophets of Israel who, 



THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 87 

in the teeth of an overwhelming public opinion 
and prejudice, exalted Jehovah as the God not of 
Israel or Judah only, but as the God of the whole 
earth! Among the Greeks and Romans, it was 
the Stoics who most prominently and effectively 
championed the universal brotherhood of man, 
which they called "cosmopolitanism." In India 
too one of Buddhism's most important aspects is 
its noble uncompromising protest against caste dis- 
tinctions and its refusal to recognize the system for 
a moment. In the realm of Christian doctrine 
also, thank God, the Wesleyan insistence upon the 
free and universally proffered grace of God fur- 
nished a much-needed retort to the intolerant Cal- 
vinistic doctrines of election and reprobation. 
Most important of all, Jesus in his life, and in the 
spirit of his words and deeds, refused flatly to 
accept the Pharisaic division of men into saints 
and sinners, religious people and those outside the 
pale. Jesus went about doing good to all, to the 
so-called "evil" as much as to the so-called "good," 
to the Pharisee and to the publican alike, to those 
that thought themselves righteous and to those 
that knew themselves to be sinners. It was one 
of the stock accusations against him by his enemies 
that he ate and drank and associated not with the 
rich and cultivated only, but with the despised 



88 THE WAR WITHIN 

and the outcasts. He came, he himself said in 
reply to an innuendo of this sort, precisely to call 
sinners to repentance. He preached his gospel, 
hopefully and nothing doubting, to the poor, the 
neglected, the evil elements of the society of his 
day. He fanned the spark of manhood in those 
whom the religious leaders of the people had con- 
demned and ostracized. He even respected and 
so awoke the womanhood of harlots. Always 
during his life among men, he declined unhesita- 
tingly and absolutely to give up any man or woman, 
whatever his or her character or condition or past. 
In a day when the sheep were all neatly fenced off 
from the goats, he ignored and ran athwart the 
whole cruel arrangement. Men for him were not 
sheep — all good, nor goats — utterly hopeless. Men 
were for him human souls, capable of the best and 
of the worst, all of them without exception needing 
to be roused to higher things and all of them able 
to follow the truth and be his disciples — if they 
would. The best men in all ages and Jesus above 
all at their head have branded sheep-and-goat 
judgments of men as false and harsh. 

Yet despite all this which may be called with 
truth the revelation of God on the subject, the 
tendency to classify men as either sheep or goats 
has persisted through the past and is present at 



THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 89 

this moment in our world and even, alas, in you 
and me. It appears in political arguments at 
well-nigh every election. We are all acquainted 
with the party man who sees nothing but high- 
mindedness in his party and its candidates and 
nothing but folly and self-seeking in the opposition. 
For some Republicans all Republicans are sheep and 
all Democrats are goats, while on the other hand for 
some Democrats the same classification is used, 
only that the labels are reversed. And in general 
the " stalwart" or " straight- ticket " voter is wrong 
in his underlying principle, which is — whether he 
realize it or not — that men are, politically speak- 
ing, either sheep or goats. It is the independent, 
the "ballot-scratcher" who is looking for able men 
of principle and votes for such, whichever party 
name they may chance to bear, who is the most 
useful citizen, and precisely for the reason that he 
has risen above sheep-and-goat judgments. 

The tendency is seen in that deep problem, in 
that deep sin we can scarcely avoid terming it, 
which we call race-prejudice. The essence of race- 
prejudice is that men of a particular color or racial 
stock are, by virtue of that single fact, regarded 
and treated as irretrievable outcasts. Whatever 
their high principles or talents, they are, says race- 
prejudice, pariahs and must remain apart from us 



90 THE WAR WITHIN 

and, most cruel of all, they must renounce the 
highest possibilities and opportunities of human 
development. On the other hand whatever the 
white man's weaknesses and vices, he is and must 
ever be exalted above the negro, or the Jew, or the 
Chinaman. Is not this obviously the same cruel 
and mistaken dividing of men into sheep and goats? 
We condemn it in the Pharisee or the Calvinist, 
why not condemn it also where it appears, as in 
this problem, in ourselves? 

The tendency crops out in the church when 
Christians — so-called at least — regard their denom- 
ination as so absolutely correct and divine in every 
detail that they believe every other denomination 
to be, as a matter of course, utterly and entirely 
in error. Some Protestants take that attitude 
toward other protestant branches of the church. 
Every Protestant denomination has some adherents 
who despise the Roman Catholic, or at least are 
sure that his religion has in it nothing but lies and 
conspiracies and devices of the evil one. On the 
other hand Roman Catholic authorities by papal 
pronouncement and essential doctrine, view Protes- 
tants as such, so long as they remain outside the 
Roman Catholic fold, as unmitigated and irre- 
deemable heretics. Men in the church, as out of 
it, are often, we may rejoice to realize, better than 



THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 91 

their theories, but such theories as these wherever 
found, among Protestants or Roman Catholics 
alike, are narrow, intolerant, insufferable, and in- 
sulting divisions of men and still worse of Chris- 
tian brethren into sheep and goats. 

Perhaps the sheep-and-goat classification is used 
most frequently and most pointedly however in 
the moral judgments we make upon the individuals 
with whom we have relations of various kinds. 
We are forever regarding our vices and those of 
our friends as venial and unimportant, while we 
condemn other men's failings as inexcusable and 
shocking. Ourselves and ours are to our thinking 
sheep, while those others are most contemptible 
goats. The other man's vices may be of various 
types. Perhaps he is addicted to some bad habit 
or he may cherish wrong political ideas or employ 
harmful methods. It may be his occupation or 
his antecedents which are at fault. But whatever 
it be, the fact is that, for many of us, there is no 
good and no possibility of good in many of the men 
we meet every day. We all have a decided tend- 
ency for example to regard as bad in every particu- 
lar the person who drinks now and then, or is 
connected with grafting, or fights, or has fought 
on the side of the saloon or corrupt politicians. 
Now these deeds are all of them evil, they are 



92 THE WAR WITHIN 

weak, dangerous spots in any man's record, but 
they do not make a man a dog or a devil, with no 
possibility of reformation, with no goodness in 
him as vital and remarkable in its way perhaps as 
our own. Such men are often our enemies and 
that affects our judgments. One need not and 
should not cease opposing them in so far as they 
are standing for anything which is injurious to the 
public welfare. Every man on the wrong side of 
every important question is and ought to be your 
enemy and mine. But do not fight a man of this 
type excepting on those points where he is in the 
wrong, else you are putting yourself in the wrong! 
Above all never hate them, do not cast them into 
the outer darkness so far as you are concerned; 
beware, in a word, of branding them as goats! 
Jesus bade us love our enemies. That does not 
mean to surrender to them, nor to call their evil 
good. It does mean that we should be fair to them, 
open-minded to any and every good in them, treat- 
ing them like brothers, even though erring brothers. 
Sheep-and-goat moral judgments of men! I 
warn you against them! They have done infinite 
harm in the world! They have stiffened and re- 
inforced spiritual pride and ministered to that 
detestable spirit with which one thanks God that 
one is not as other men ! They have hardened and 



THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS 93 

crushed and destroyed many a soul that might 
have been saved otherwise. Most clinching of all 
the indictments against this classification of men, 
sheep-and-goat judgments are not harmful only: 
they are false, they are at variance with the facts. 
Men may, in another life possibly — as the parable 
suggests — become sheep and goats in earnest, but 
in this life which we are now living, no man is 
hopelessly bad and none is impeccably good. On 
the one hand we are all miserable sinners in some 
aspect or another, while on the other hand we all, 
even the worst, reflect somewhat of the glory of 
God in our poor clay. We are every one of us in 
possibility both sheep and goats I Really to grasp 
that fact — few of us have done so as yet — would 
have a most profitable double effect upon us. It 
would at once immeasurably increase our humility 
as regards ourselves, and it would, still better, 
deepen our respect as regards our neighbors. 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 



HOARDING has ever been a common human 
failing. This is so characteristic indeed of 
men that our greatest writers have frequently 
recurred to descriptions of misers. Shakespeare 
with his "Shylock," Moliere in L'Avare, Balzac in 
Eugenie Grandet, George Eliot in Silas Mamer, 
all these and many more have pondered from 
differing standpoints upon the miser type. We 
have all read and enjoyed one or another portrayal 
of this clear-cut vice. I venture to suggest, how- 
ever, that we have never dreamed that we ourselves 
are, quite possibly, guilty of this very fault. For 
if we will but consider what miserliness at bottom 
is, we shall come to see that a miser is not neces- 
sarily one who has somewhere a secret hoard; he 
is not, as a matter of course, one who pushes his 
fingers voluptuously through a pile of gold-pieces, 
gloating over the glistening luster of his " yellow- 
boys." These characteristics are all found in the 
commonly read descriptions of misers, I know, yet 
they are but external and non-essential. The 
essence of a miser is that he puts the means of life 
above life. The miser as such is one who forgets 
deeply and shamefully the truism that life is more 
than the food which nourishes life and therefore 

97 



98 THE WAR WITHIN 

he squanders his effort, his interest, his love, first, 
last, and always upon the means of life, ignoring 
all the while life itself, the meaning which alone 
gives value of any kind to any means of life. 
Misers differ according to the means of life they 
most affect, but the fundamental axiom of miserli- 
ness — it is expressed in actions instead of in words 
— is not, as Jesus says, "the life is more than the 
food," but precisely the opposite: the food is more 
than life! It is incredible that anybody should 
really think so, but the miser builds his life upon 
that assumption. 

Now if this be the definition of a miser, then 
misers are all about us beyond a doubt. Look 
with me at some of the unregarded ones of this 
present day. First of all one must at least mention 
those that pile up money, not in any hidden hoard, 
but in investments, real-estate, bank-accounts, and 
the like. How many business men there are who 
keep on earning money when they have more 
already than they can ever spend, much less use. 
They do this largely, I am well aware, because they 
are acquainted with nothing else with which to 
occupy their time. But, strange though it may 
seem, there are other things to do in the world 
beside the making of money ! The practical better- 
ment of the town in which one lives, the social 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 99 

uplift of certain degraded classes, the spreading of 
needful information and better methods of living, 
the entering with heart and soul into some worthy 
cause, such as organized charities, the Y.M.C.A., 
the missionary conquest of the world, world-wide 
peace. These and many similar activities near and 
far are ever clamoring for workers and most of 
all — for they are all sadly in want of money — 
workers who will serve without remuneration. 
You of Colorado, who have come to this glorious 
climate of sunshine for your health or the health 
of some member of your family, and have come 
with sufficient income, never think that money- 
making is the only proper method of occupying 
your time here. There are hundreds and thou- 
sands of other and far better ways of rilling your 
moments. So for all Americans. Let it be 
emphasized that when one does not need the 
money, the constant amassing of it only hurts one's 
family by tempting them to extravagance, and 
injures one's country by increasing envy and class- 
distinctions, and — still more to the point — makes 
of the man who is guilty of it, a miser pure and 
simple ! 

Then there is the class of misers who gather 
together not money but belongings. Can one who 
spends be a miser ? Why yes indeed, if he spends 



ioo THE WAR WITHIN 

for what ministers in no degree to life. Furniture, 
extra houses, jewels, trips to Europe, these may 
and even usually do aid better and more gracious 
living and if they are thus useful, nobody has any 
right to condemn them. But when they are 
acquired, not for life, but for pride of ownership and 
a desire to swagger, then these and all other such 
unassimilated possessions are so many various out- 
croppings of the hoarding spirit. Ostentation is 
clearly at bottom miserliness, for it prizes costliness 
above life. It is said that there are ten women in 
New York who own, each of them, diamonds to 
the value of a half million dollars or over. One 
of them, not long since, wore $450,000 in jewelry 
to a party. Was that really useful to her life or 
happiness? Not in the least! She was a miser, 
that was all : and socially speaking the more dan- 
gerous for being a miser not in private, but in full 
public view! 

It sometimes occurs to me, lingering still upon 
miserliness in material things, that we all of us in 
these days play the miser far too much in our 
gloatings over our modern conveniences. We are 
able to do many things quickly and easily which 
our fathers did much more cumbersomely. That 
is all very well and very pleasant for us. But 
the object of it is or should be better living. 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 101 

Conveniences ought never to be mere ends in them- 
selves. A Pullman train is not superior to the 
older stage-coach if the time and effort saved 
conduces in no way to greater human value and 
usefulness. A wireless message, in itself con- 
sidered, is no better than the note delivered by 
hand after long weary miles of sailing, if men's 
living is not in some degree deepened by the greater 
rapidity of communication. The remark is some- 
times heard that the old-style long letters had a 
quiet vitality and helpfulness which the curt 
telephone-talk lacks. Whether this is so or not 
is not perhaps definitely certain, but in so far as 
it is an accurate statement, it goes to show that we 
are not using the telephone's opportunity as we 
ought. Our modern conveniences are aids in gen- 
eral to living more inclusively and effectively. I 
feel sure that in a large, broad way they do help 
that better life and that wiser, more earnest spirit 
which is undoubtedly in the world of today. What 
I insist upon is that they must do this. If we who 
have so much more than our fathers had are not, 
every one of us, beyond our fathers in most im- 
portant respects, that fact would indicate at once 
that we are a decidedly inferior brood as compared 
with them. In so far as we have more, in just so 
far is more and better life to be expected of us. 



102 THE WAR WITHIN 

The question for our generation in this regard is 
this: Are our modern appliances and advantages 
mere enjoyments and luxuries, or do they release 
us as they can do and ought to do, to more blessed, 
more vital, more helpful living? We call them 
" improvements": what do they improve? Our 
comfort or our life ? Do we revel in them like 
misers, or do we sincerely and earnestly make 
good use of them ? To take them as a matter of 
course, and be not the better but the more at ease, 
the more selfishly luxurious because of them, this 
is to hoard comfort upon comfort, ignoring the 
warning that the life is more than the means of 
life. 

But miserliness is to be discovered not in material 
ways alone. There are intellectual misers. There 
are, for example, the specialists in the scientific and 
educational world. Surely specialists ought not to 
be condemned wholesale. It is they, in cases 
without number, who have made our modern 
existence wiser, safer, happier, and saner. They 
are usually ministers to life. But there is now and 
then a danger that some of them may become 
misers — misers of knowledge. The modern split- 
ting up of a subject into infinitesimal regions in 
each of which some man imprisons himself min- 
isters not always to living, but sometimes to mere 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 103 

acquisitiveness. You will remember perhaps the 
young man, son of a specialist on ailments of the 
nose and throat, who informed his father one day, 
late in his medical course, that he intended to 
devote his attention in his profession to the nostril 
exclusively. The father made no objection but 
queried casually, " which nostril?" Such a point 
of view is of course simply ludicrous and the story 
can scarcely be intended to be taken seriously, I 
know. Yet for all that, some present-day speciali- 
zation comes perilously near being of this type. 
Detailed accurate information is valuable and vital 
to the living of us all, but if it is too near-sighted 
or too much cut off from the larger universe of 
facts, it very speedily becomes distorted and in 
so far profoundly inaccurate. Still more, the man 
who specializes in this inhuman fashion is in danger 
of making of himself very soon a mere automa- 
ton, gathering facts indefatigably but neither living 
upon them himself nor making them really available 
for others. Such specialists have forgotten that 
a fact is not in itself valuable. They fail to realize 
that life is more than any fact as such can ever be. 
But the putting of knowledge above life is not 
confined to a few scientific specialists. Look at 
our latter-day universal respect for education. 
This respect is justified by the larger, deeper life 



104 THE WAR WITHIN 

education ordinarily brings, but it must not be 
overlooked that it is the life which knowledge of 
this sort serves that is the important matter. 
Young people have been known cruelly to evade 
home duties and responsibilities because they were 
determined to graduate from college, even though 
mother had to take in washing and the younger 
children of the family grow up stunted by extreme 
poverty. An education of such a type, founded 
upon selfishness and the ignoring of duty is a sin 
and a shame: it is not the life but the death of 
the spirit. Education ministers usually to life, but 
when education and life conflict, then life, true, 
loving, dutiful life must be emphasized rather than 
this means of life ! 

The average man, also, who never went to college 
nor ever expects to, is often tempted to this same 
idolatrous miserliness as to knowledge. There is 
a widespread thirst for knowledge which is fine and 
wholesome in so far as knowledge ordinarily 
broadens and develops and glorifies living. But 
now and again there is need of insisting upon the 
supreme importance of life over knowledge. There 
is a consuming passion for knowing more which 
is in the air nowadays and affects everybody more 
or less. People will flock to any and every oppor- 
tunity for learning something, but they will be 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 105 

strangely oblivious when it is not knowledge but 
life which is offered them. For example there is 
a tendency, of which every church can furnish 
illustrations, for the men to be present at a discus- 
sion of social problems in one of our Sunday-school 
" business man's" classes and then to omit to stay 
to the regular worship of the church which immedi- 
ately follows. The former is knowledge, the latter 
is life, and they show in this way how decidedly 
they rate knowledge above life ! Similarly women 
will crowd a university lecture-room at a club meet- 
ing to hear the details of a Peruvian epic or an 
Icelandic saga, but they have no time for a prayer- 
meeting which can feed their souls. They rate 
knowledge above life I Yes, and some church- 
members will listen to sermons which contain, it 
is to be supposed, some degree of information, but 
their minds will be far away during the preliminary 
service which so powerfully aids spiritual living, if 
it is carefully followed. Then there is the matter 
of attendance at the bi-monthly observance of the 
Lord's Supper. This is peculiarly, as all are aware, 
an offer of life, yet this service is always, in every 
church, more poorly attended than the regular 
preaching. The trouble with church-members in 
such cases is that they, too, rate knowledge above 
life. 



106 THE WAR WITHIN 

We put knowledge above life in more individual 
ways as well. Father will read the newspaper for 
an hour for the facts contained therein, when he 
ought to be living fifty minutes of that hour with 
his boys, influencing them and vitalizing their 
ideals. Mother will read her Ladies Home Journal 
or talk over the telephone about a novelty in fancy- 
work, though she has, as she thinks, no time for 
living close to the daily thoughts and awakening 
needs of her daughter. 

Oh, again and again we, all of us, allow the pur- 
suit of knowledge to stifle life! We are, it often 
seems, simply infatuated with knowledge for 
knowledge's sake. It is reaching the point where 
men will do well-nigh anything for the merest scrap 
or morsel of reliable information. We are, many 
of us, so devoted to knowledge that we have little 
time or energy left for life. Surely, surely this is 
miserliness, the rating of the means of living above 
life itself. Ask yourself how much of your time, 
outside your daily occupation, is given to your 
better living and that of your family, and how 
much to the gathering of information of one sort 
or another: and you will be startled, I venture to 
predict, to discover how largely the quest of 
knowledge has usurped almost all of your leisure. 
Now knowledge as a means to life has a value, but 



SOME UNREGARDED MISERS 107 

knowledge is not and must not be allowed to become 
an end in itself. The heaping up of information 
and facts is as such no more elevating than the 
heaping up miser-fashion of anything else. This 
sounds like heresy, but it is true. The supreme 
value is not any means to life, but life, life! 

One might go on to refer to other forms of 
miserliness which are nowadays appearing. One 
might advert to the rivalry in heaping up warships 
and armies which is the miserliness on a large scale 
of nearly every civilized nation of the world at this 
moment. One might pause on that passion for 
mere size and numbers which infects cities and 
states and schools — and even churches sometimes. 
Illustrations will recur to you of themselves, once 
the principle of miserliness is discerned. Almost 
any good thing can be " miser ed." The duty of 
us all as men and citizens is to live truly, making 
every means to life serve its purpose, not allowing 
any to stiffen into dead material for piling up a 
hoard. God created things for life, never life for 
things ! 



OUR MODERN BABEL 



"HE still and know that I am God!" says the 
■U Psalmist. That is, however, a hard require- 
ment in this present day to fulfil ! For we live, and 
to a large extent we must live, in a world which is 
a Babel of busy, bustling noise and confusion. 

The cultivated man becomes most conscious of 
this Babel perhaps when he remarks the many and 
varying cries which call to him from all directions. 
Look at the news-sheets both daily and weekly, 
which gather on our reading-tables so rapidly that 
we cannot burn them fast enough to keep the pile 
within reasonable proportions. Think of the 
monthlies and quarterlies that litter our houses and 
weigh down our mails, every one of them a chorus 
of voices shouting information and new ideas from 
all the world and from all times into our poor ears. 
Read merely the titles of the hundreds and thou- 
sands of books every week being published and 
advertised and commented upon. Consider the 
time and labor spent in our universities to 
excogitate some novel theory so that still another 
book or article may come into being. There can 
be little doubt that the reading public is in these 
days living in Babel. 
But not that alone: all of us, whether we are 

in 



112 THE WAR WITHIN 

in touch with the world of the mind or not, know 
what the word Babel means in our enjoyments and 
activities. Is it not true that the average person 
everywhere is able to be everything but still ? We 
are forever in motion in body if not in mind. We 
are either calling or receiving calls, attending a 
concert or a club-meeting or an entertainment or 
lodge or gatherings or receptions or institutes or 
what not. Continually we are going out or coming 
in, getting ready for or getting over something or 
other, ever anticipating or filled with memories of 
some exciting strenuous activity. Even worse are 
the thronging worries and anxieties which buzz 
unceasingly about the heads of most of us, keeping 
us awake nights and graving wrinkles in our faces: 
fear of losing our positions or our savings, worry 
about next week's or next year's prosperity, or, it 
may be, black care for tomorrow's daily bread 
which dogs the steps of many in these times. Then 
finally see the reign nowadays of committees and 
conferences and " movements" of all kinds in 
charities and in churches, in political parties and 
in missionary boards, wherever one looks. Cir- 
cular letters, personal appeals, unionizing efforts 
of every sort, these, from yet another angle, swell 
the loud crescendo which rends the air today. 
We live, each of us, in a world slightly differing 



OUR MODERN BABEL 113 

from that of every other human being, but the 
world of us all is, in one way or another, a perfect 
Babel of information and discussion, of activity 
and perpetual motion, of machinery and multiplied 
methods of organization, of cares and anxieties. 
We move in a chaos of conflicting cries and calls 
which are numerous and various and, in particular, 
taken all together, deafening. It is little wonder 
that amid this uproar we cannot think or worship. 
Men and women will smile with weary sarcasm at 
the admonition to "be still and know that I am 
God!" 

Yet those words must be heeded. This unmiti- 
gated confusion of modern life cannot be allowed 
to continue. Already indeed there are many evil 
results of it beginning to show themselves. There 
is that unrest and tenseness, especially to be ob- 
served in this country and therefore often called 
in grim jest "Americanitis"! Men and women 
become so accustomed to the turmoil and inces- 
sant bustle about them and within them that they 
cannot or at least will not do without it. They 
must be ever "on the go"; they are bored inexpres- 
sibly if they chance to be where all is quiet or even 
if they are obliged to stay at home for an evening : 
and if they are so unfortunate as to be for a 
moment by themselves with nobody to speak to 



114 THE WAR WITHIN 

and nothing to read, they find the situation simply 
intolerable. How many there are in these days who 
are chronically, morbidly restless and fidgety we 
all know very well. It is a baneful condition which 
is the direct result of our modern Babel! 

Still another and more sinister effect is to be 
remarked in the exhaustion which is caused by 
this unquiet over-stimulated manner of life. 
Collapses and break-downs are occurring every day. 
None seem exempt. We are constantly hearing 
with surprise that so-and-so, the very one often 
of whom we should have least expected it, has 
stopped work and is taking a journey or a course 
of sanatorium treatment for his health. All about 
us men and women are wearing out before their 
time. They are showing the strain, the over-strain 
of all this noisy, never-ceasing tumult, until it 
almost seems sometimes that men cannot do full 
work at present and live to a good, healthy old 
age as formerly. 

The worst result of our modern Babel, however, 
is the spiritual one. Even where people escape 
the unnatural unrest of the day, even though they 
are sufficiently robust to risk nervous prostration 
with impunity, yet our modern life with its noise 
and its incessant claims upon us makes leisure and 
stillness and therefore religion almost if not quite 



OUR MODERN BABEL 115 

impossible and that is a tremendous, crucial indict- 
ment of this generation. It is undoubtedly true 
that our times are effective, immensely effective. 
We are doing all sorts of things of which our 
fathers never dreamed. Our successes and con- 
veniences are startling as compared with those of 
even twenty-five years ago. We are solving many 
scientific and historical problems which were 
earlier thought to be insurmountable. We are 
gaining comfort and knowledge and power by leaps 
and bounds. But if we have lost the ability to be 
still, we are worse and not better off despite it all. 
This modern world is a good world; the things it 
accomplishes are not in any sense to be condemned : 
but if it cannot perform its tasks without over- 
tightening the strings and sapping men's vigor; 
above all if people cannot live in this modern world 
and on occasion be still within, still to a sufficient 
degree to know and hear God: then our modern 
existence stands convicted, for what shall it profit 
a man, or a generation, to gain the whole world and 
lose its own soul! If we must choose between 
modern efficiency and human life well-rounded 
and true, there is no question which we ought to 
choose. 

But are we shut up to a dilemma of this kind ? 
Must we choose between modern results and 



n6 THE WAR WITHIN 

human values? Is this never-pausing confusion 
and noisy hubbub necessary to our present-day 
effectiveness? Much must go on and many things 
we do must be done, but need the modern world 
be a Babel, crushing, deafening, destroying ? Why 
no! we realize it the moment we really turn our 
thoughts to the matter. We should keep our 
modern wonderful results, but we must and we 
can, if we try, abate the turmoil of it all. Already 
there are many attempts in this direction mani- 
festing themselves. There is the anti-noise crusade 
at the very bottom, which stands as a physical 
analogue of all the rest. There are the extensions 
of park-systems and breathing-spots in our cities. 
There is the vacation idea spreading more widely 
every year — a practical and useful method of 
soothing the ever-present over-stimulation. The 
move toward suburban dwellings is operating 
toward the same valuable end. And then the reign 
of machinery in social helpfulness is mercifully 
lightening in certain directions. We begin to 
comprehend that, while organizations and com- 
mittees are often indispensable, things can be 
carried on more simply and with less creaking of 
mechanism. Reformers and lovers of mankind are 
coming to recognize that over-organization is a 
graver danger to a good cause than used to be 



OUR MODERN BABEL 117 

realized. We are depending more largely of late 
upon men's good sense. We are accomplishing 
things more through common feelings and ideals 
than we used to. Even our political machines are 
feeling the new emphasis and losing consequently 
their earlier prestige to some extent. We are 
realizing that our form of government itself may 
be, and, indeed, to a larger extent than we know, 
already is what President Hadley in one of his 
treatises calls " government by public opinion," 
not by clangorous wheels within wheels, but by 
an intangible unhurrying spirit. So within the 
church, we are recovering, or soon will recover, 
from our former fever for organizations of any and 
every sort. That forming a committee or society 
for every conceivable object has worn out, all 
unnecessarily in the past, far too many of the 
saints. In general men within as without the 
church are considering in their estimate of a man, 
not the organization, ecclesiastical or otherwise, to 
which he belongs, but the quality and character 
of the man himself. Fair dealing, sympathy, 
brotherliness, these are being seen to be the really 
important data. The things of chief value are 
not the varying denominations of churches, not 
the richness or barrenness of their liturgy, not the 
details of their descriptions of God — all tending 



Ii8 THE WAR WITHIN 

to wrangling and Babel. It is not these or any- 
thing like them which count most: it is the right 
spirit, silent but effective, which thinking men 
respect and believe should be cultivated. In 
school and college too, views are changing. There 
is a turning away from multitudinous studies and 
the ideal of encyclopedic information which only 
tends to confuse and stifle the mind — even the 
mature mind. In place of that, educators are 
seeking to establish symmetrical cultural courses 
whose prime effect will be to evoke and mold 
mental poise and vigor. Not knowledge, which 
is Babel, but wisdom and quiet power are increas- 
ingly the aim of the best education today. In all 
these ways — some obvious, some not so apparent 
— the trend is observable away from noisy and con- 
fused voices of whatever type, and toward a 
deeper silence and a more fundamental dependence 
upon life and spirit. Those men and women who 
are wisest are becoming aware that the Babel 
quality of modern life is not only dangerous but 
unnecessary, and they are consequently moving in 
a campaign against it, hushing little by little, as 
they can, the blare of it. 

Yet with all that has been done in these ways, 
the modern world in which we must live remains 
still, as yet, all too noisy, tense, suffocating, 



OUR MODERN BABEL 119 

ruinous a fact. Babel is not overcome, far from 
it! It is all about us and we must do what we can, 
each for ourselves, that we may be, in the very 
heart of it, at times still. How shall we, how 
can we achieve this which seems to many of us 
utterly impossible? First of all let us ease the 
strain as we can whenever it is possible. Nature 
does it for us sometimes by a rainy downpour or 
a blizzard which keeps us indoors, but we should 
not wait for such compulsion which does not come 
always at just the needed moment, and especially 
in this climate of ours where nature almost never 
shuts us in. Let us hold ourselves at home for our 
own good now and then, taking one evening in each 
week, taking it by main force if it is necessary — 
and it often will be — and spending it quietly, 
leisurely by our own fireside with our family. 
Again we can keep ourselves from having engage- 
ments, from holding offices, from attempting plans 
of reading, up to the full capacity of our time. 
This does not mean that we should do nothing: 
it does mean that we should not allow ourselves 
to be swamped, as many are nowadays, by what 
we seek in vain to do. We can, further, utilize 
the pauses which sometimes come, when we have 
missed a train, or lie awake at night, or are laid 
aside by illness. Let us spend these times of 



120 THE WAR WITHIN 

waiting, not with that impatience and watching 
the clock or the calendar which is the common 
practice with most of us: let us rather welcome 
these pauses as so many God-given opportunities 
for stillness of soul. Ease the strain ! That is the 
first self-defense of each of us against our modern 
Babel. 

There is also another way of self -protection. It 
is the doing of certain deeds for spiritual ends — 
deeds which are not practical and promise to bring 
us no return in either money or information or 
pleasure, but are yet worth while because they will 
strengthen and nourish the inner life. We might 
each day, every one of us, read and brood upon a 
page, or a single sentence even, of some book which 
is "still," giving upon the deeper realities. Such 
books are, above all, the Bible, but also Emerson, 
or Thoreau, or many another, or perhaps one of 
those little collections of helpful, vital quotations 
which ought to have a place on the table of every 
one of us. Or a similar result might be aided by 
the observation of surrounding outdoor nature, in 
beautiful and threatening moods alike, in light and 
in shadow, in clear or snowy weather. It takes 
no appreciable amount of time to notice these 
wonders of God day by day as we go about our 
tasks, but persisted in, this observing with the 



OUR MODERN BABEL 121 

seeing eye deepens the soul and helps us to that 
quietness we now and then must have. So with 
prayer, for every Christian who has learned what 
it is and how it is offered. Indeed much that has 
been described above is prayer. 

Here then is the sum of the whole matter. Our 
modern world, if we are not on our guard, will be 
to us wearing, disintegrating, soul-destroying, and 
our refuge from it all is to be at times still. The 
warning of the Psalmist with which we began is 
not an unmeaning command put upon us by an 
official authority: it is a highly valuable piece of 
advice to our day and to ourselves as individuals. 
In just so far as we take it to heart, shall we save 
our life, physical, social, spiritual! May we not 
hope that God may teach us and our times the 
meaning of quietness and slow time, moderating 
for us the allegro of modern life, bestowing upon 
us more and more His peace, the peace which 
passeth all understanding ! 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 



THERE is a celebrated painting, by George 
Frederick Watts, of a woman crouching on 
a great rock, blindfolded, and clutching tight a 
lyre every string of which, save one, is broken. 
On that one string she plays and listens, eagerly 
bending over and putting her ear close, to hear 
that slight music which is still possible to her. 
The painting is called "Hope." Probably most 
of us are at first surprised by that title. Can this 
be hope ? Hope is not for us something tense and 
desolated in this fashion. We think of it as a final 
joy of the gladsome; as that which gilds the gold 
and refines the rose of happiness; as lending an 
additional flavor of anticipation to the feast of life; 
not as clinging to one last string or listening to one 
last possibility, but as exuberant, overflowing. If 
we were to paint "Hope," we should paint it almost 
certainly as a bright stalwart youth, standing up- 
right and joyous, gazing ahead with shining eyes, 
striking with force and glee a full-stringed lyre. 
It would never occur to us to picture it as a blinded 
and forlorn maiden, brooding over an all but 
demolished music. And yet, the more one thinks 
of it, the more must one realize the truth of Watts's 
painting. There is a passage in the Psalms which 

125 



126 THE WAR WITHIN 

says the same thing in words. "Why art thou 
cast down my soul, and why art thou disquieted 
within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet 
praise him who is the health of my countenance 
and my God."* The real meaning of it all, 
according to Watts and the Psalmist, is something 
like this: Hope is not having everything and 
looking for still more. That could hardly be called 
a virtue, and hope is decidedly a virtue. No, hope 
is the forcible upholding and supporting of the 
soul when all else gives way. It is not a fair- 
weather matter: it is a storm-and-stress virtue. 
It is not a fragrant bouquet of flowers, adorning 
a banquet of good things: it is an anchor, rusty, 
uncouth, but strong — an anchor that holds firm 
when tempestuous waves almost overwhelm the 
ship of life. 

See how the Psalmist exemplifies in detail this 
virtue of hope. For the man who uttered the 
words just quoted, God was a hidden quantity. 
All was "black as the pit from pole to pole" so 
far as he was concerned. He could not praise 
God. He could not feel sure that there was a 
God in his present mood. Nor was there any 
prospect of aid or better times to be discerned. 
He was distressed and perplexed. His soul was 

*Ps. 42:11. 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 127 

cast down and disquieted within him. In all these 
difficulties the only support he had was his resolute 
determination. It was not God but hope that for 
the moment sustained him. Not that God was 
really absent. He was, of course, near by as, 
however distant he may seem, he is ever near to 
every son of man. But so far as the Psalmist 
could know or even believe, in the mood he was in, 
God was not with him. Yet he held on; he bore 
up despite his loneliness and depression and 
danger. Oh, there is courage, there is virtue in 
that hoarse shout of the Psalmist to his soul, 
"Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him who 
is the health of my countenance and my God!" 
We all need to consider and realize the value and 
place of this virtue of hope. For there is no life 
but has its times when everything seems to give 
way, when the only support which can keep us 
from shipwreck is the valiant assertion of hope, 
even when we feel least like hoping. God deals 
with men, we must remember, in two typical ways : 
by his presence, clear and winning — there is no 
problem in that — but also by his apparent absence, 
chilling and hard; by lifting up all our difficulty 
for us — that is what we like and seek from him — 
but also by letting us bear it alone; by keeping 
temptation far from us — it is for that we pray in 



128 THE WAR WITHIN 

the Lord's Prayer — but also by allowing us to be 
tested to the uttermost; by giving us joys and 
prosperities, but also by taking these from us one 
by one. There are pleasant, and there are unpleas- 
ant ways of God with the souls of men. There 
are comprehensible, and there are incomprehensible 
dealings of the Almighty. They are all divine and 
righteous. There is no chance or whim about their 
coming to us. God uses both methods, the kindly 
and the harsh alike, carefully, wisely, the one as 
much so as the other. He does not love us less — 
perhaps, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
suggests,* he really loves us more — when he sends 
what we dislike. There is a divine purpose behind 
the darkest night that may enshroud us. God 
uses hard chastenings for the same reason that he 
uses what happiness he gives to us: in order that 
we may be developed, spiritualized, led to do in 
the best way his work in the world — his service 
which is perfect freedom. However cruel his 
dealings sometimes seem, they are chosen and sent 
upon us with infinite care and are every one signs 
of his love and his pity. Difficulty and danger, 
loss and bereavement — these are not indications 
then that God has forgotten or is neglecting us, 
still less that he wantonly enjoys our bewilderment 

*Chap. 12. 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 129 

and perplexity, as we are sometimes in our despair 
tempted to think. Earthly parents do, it is true, 
now and then tease and even frighten a child for 
their own amusement — and a most unkind and 
selfish recreation it is. But God does nothing in 
that spirit. All that he sends, all that he allows 
to come upon us is an instrument in his hand to 
assist us to self-reliance and character and courage, 
to living mature manhood or womanhood and use- 
fulness. Like the mother-bird with her fledglings, 
God frequently, for the same wise reason, pushes 
us forth from the easy, comfortable nest in which 
we are, and bids us use our wings for ourselves. 
How should we ever be masters of our own powers, 
if God were forever carrying us on " flowery beds 
of ease"? There is a meaning then in every 
chastening or withdrawing of the Father. Even 
in the bitterest stress of life, hope is never foolish 
and futile. 

But oh it is hard! We have all known how 
hard! What a desolation comes over us when we 
grasp the fact of God's absence! How terrible it 
is when he leaves us, heartlessly it seems, solitary 
and deserted in the midst of peril. There is no 
doubt that it is painful. Such times are for every 
man or woman stormy weather beyond a per- 
adventure. Our souls will of necessity be cast 



130 THE WAR WITHIN 

down. We shall feel sore and grieved. Like Job, 
in his first writhings of anguish, we shall perhaps 
find no words or thoughts too bitter. Like Elijah 
under the juniper tree, we shall find it easy to say, 
"It is enough, now Lord, take away my life!" 
Like Jesus, even Jesus, on the cross we too may 
groan, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me ?" We shall be profoundly disquieted and cast 
down. It is natural that at the first moment it 
should be thus with us. One would scarcely be 
human, if it were not so. But after those first 
moments of stunned amazement, then is the time, 
the very time for the victory of hope. 

Consider a few applications of the victory of 
hope to hard places in our lives. The first and 
most obvious of these will naturally be misfortune 
or bereavement. There come to us, or there will 
come before we are done with life, times when 
much is taken from us and more and more, as the 
weeks go by, seems ruthlessly torn from our grasp. 
We cannot understand it. We are dazed. We 
could say with the writer of the psalm: "All thy 
waves and thy billows are gone over me." We 
incline to say that all is wrong. Nothing seems 
any longer worth while to us. The world is out of 
joint! Even God tarries. He is for the time 
neither a help nor an encouragement. We cry 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 131 

aloud for that which we have lost, for the dear 
relative whom we cannot do without, or at least 
for a mighty support from the divine compassion. 
But nothing comes. God is silent. "Oh," we 
groan within ourselves, "where is he, that I might 
find him!" But alas! we cannot find him. Ah! 
there we must say — what else is there possible for 
us to say — "Hope thou in God, for I shall yet 
praise him who is the health of my countenance 
and my God." Hope, nothing but hope, can 
carry one through the desolation and the apparent 
God-forsakenness of some forms of affliction. 

Another place for hope is our later Christian lives 
and beliefs, especially as we compare these with 
our earlier certainties. At the beginning of our 
Christian living, above all if we were converted in 
the old-fashioned way, everything was easy. God 
was certainly present for us every moment. We 
could do any task — we were sure of it — if only we 
knew it to be our duty. We shouted, within our 
souls, as sober fact those words of the inspired 
enthusiast, "I can do all things in him that 
strengtheneth me." "How obvious, how simple, 
how glorious to be a Christian!" so we cried to 
ourselves and to others, in the glad newness of the 
eternal life. We were God-intoxicated. All life 
was to be, henceforward, walking in a plain path, 



132 THE WAR WITHIN 

hand in hand with the infinite Father of our souls. 
Yet those wonderful sunrise moments of the new 
life and the new determination faded away. It 
became harder to do what we knew we ought to 
do. Practicing the presence of God was not so 
easy. During days and even weeks at a time since 
then, we have not felt that earlier certainty of God. 
Often this falling away comes, in a different form, 
to college students. Away from home and the 
home religion, amid new ideas of life and duty, 
overborne sometimes by mistaken or misunder- 
stood implications of the modern scientific view of 
the world — thus surrounded and beset, many a 
youth and maiden has fallen into a slough of 
despond as regards his or her Christian faith. 
What is prayer and why should one pray ? What 
is God and where is he ? What is the real basis and 
what, after all is said and done, is the use of 
religion and the accepting of anything on faith? 
Is not the Christian life perhaps, that life which 
meant so much formerly, only an illusion? So 
the mind of many a student in the growing years 
of his intellect, is beaten and almost driven as it 
seems, into a retreat. It is a hard time when one 
stands between two worlds of faith, "the one dead, 
the other" as yet "powerless to be born." But oh! 
that is the time for hope, in the very midst of 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 133 

spiritual dejection. That is the time for reaching 
back to what has been, assuring oneself that in 
all essentials it shall be again. That is the time 
for facing the odds and the doubts valiantly and 
unflinchingly. Only hope is left but hope is pos- 
sible. Bear, honest doubter, the weight — the 
dead weight it may be — of life's truths and ideals, 
when such bearing is called for. "Work out your 
own salvation with fear and trembling," but with 
courage and persistence too ! This is the valley of 
shadow for many a Christian faith, but "hope thou 
in God" and he shall yet bring you through to new 
but no less Christian views, to assured and sincere 
walks and communings with him again. In all 
religious questionings strive to be like him of 
whom Tennyson sings, 

He fought his doubts and gathered strength 

He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them: thus he came at length 

To find a stronger faith his own; 

And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 

And dwells not in the light alone, 

But in the darkness and the cloud. 

Again there is great need of hope in temptation 
as it comes upon us in the allurements of some evil 
course of action. This situation appears some- 



134 THE WAR WITHIN 

times to be harder than we can withstand. It 
breaks upon us so mightily and often so unex- 
pectedly. We look for aid from above, but the 
skies are brass over our heads. All the world 
about us bids us yield. Our own hearts shrink 
from the struggle. The very absence of God ap- 
peals to us as an argument for yielding. "If God 
comes not and as it seems cares not, why should I 
care either ?" we question within ourselves. "Why 
not curse God and die of this pleasant sin ?" We go 
even further in our desperation. " Is there indeed a 
God if he can fail me here, in my hour of sorest 
need?" Why not say with Nietzsche, "God is 
dead!" "Why not begin from now to live as 
pleases myself!" Here again the remedy is hope, 
hope in what is not now but shall yet be. 

Ah these moments of terrible loneliness, of bear- 
ing life, all of it, with our own muscle if life is to 
be upborne at all, they are crucial moments! 
They seem to be too much for flesh and blood, 
but they are not. God allows strain but never 
overstrain of the spirit. He never tests us above 
that we "are able; but will with the temptation 
make also the way of escape that " we "may be able 
to endure it." Though the burden is hard, it is 
never crushing unless we permit ourselves to be 
crushed. In every exigency which God sends, we 



THE VICTORY OF HOPE 135 

can hope even though we can do nothing else. 
Without hope we must fail in dark hours, but with 
hope we can overcome, we can push through the 
difficulty. It is for us to say — how many brave 
souls have said it — ' ' I cannot see, but I shall see ! I 
cannot know or even feel sure of God now, but I shall 
know! I could yield so easily, but I will not! I 
could doubt, I could cry aloud to heaven, Joblike, my 
fears and despairings, but I will hold fast, through 
all! Everything is against me, I am filled with 
perplexity and distress; all seems to be lost, my 
eyes are blinded, my heart is empty; I am 'in the 
fell clutch of circumstance,' but yet I will hope, 
and I will not yield I" Ah, is not hope a virtue and 
a victory precisely at the most painful extremities ? 
The continuity of our life, of our true selves, 
depends, in fact at the last upon this. In a deep 
sense we are ourselves responsible for our moral 
success or failure in living, for it all rests back upon 
that hope which proceeds from our innermost souls 
and which must — for it alone can — hold us on our 
course: in darkness as in light, in storm as under 
sunny skies, in solitude as in the full consciousness 
of the presence and favor of God. In every trial, 
in every difficulty, in every forsakenness, "hope 
thou in God," for thou shalt yet see him, yes and 
thank him for every one of his leadings! 



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